* CAN THE CHRISTIAN NOW | 2 
BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION? | 


WILLIAM HALLOCK Pe cee 














eee - 4 


i ee 


a 


Fie 
i a 
ne vA ie ni 
Ais yy T vs 4 





is 





Mi 


ahs 





Can the Christian Now 
Believe in Evolution? 









“ 
<oeicai sent 


Can the Christian Now 
Believe in Evolution? 


By 
WILLIAM HALLOCK’JOHNSON, PH.D., D.D. 


Professor in Lincoln University, Pennsylvania 
Author of ‘The Christian Faith 
Under Modern Searchlights” 


_ PHILADELPHIA 
THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TIMES COMPANY 


Copyricut, 1926, sy 
Tue SunpAy ScHoo, Times CoMPANY 


PRINTED IN THE Unitep STATES OF AMERICA 


PREFACE 


during the Christmas holidays, 1925, two sig- 
nificant utterances were made on the subject 
of evolution. Professor H. F. Osborn, at the dedica- 
tion of the Peabody Museum at Yale University, de- 
clared that the time had come when evolution should 
be taught no longer as a theory but as a fact. Mean- 
while, at the meeting of the American Philosophical 
Association held in Northampton, Professor W. M. 
Urban, in his presidential address, said that the ex- 
treme statements now being made by evolutionary 
scientists were an evidence of the recrudescence of 
dogma. It is clear that the controversy has invaded 
academic circles, and that it can no longer be dis- 
missed as a contest between obscurantism on the one 
hand and enlightened scholarship on the other. 
The trial in the summer of 1925 at Dayton, Tenn., 
attracted world-wide attention, but neither the argu- 
ments in the courtroom nor the discussions in the press 
can be said to have been specially illuminating. The 
jury of intelligent public opinion, which must ulti- 
mately decide the question, is in search of evidence 
and argument rather than impassioned appeals to 
prejudice. or authority. The Dayton trial, however, 
set a great many people to thinking, and most people, 
whatever their prejudices, want to know the facts. 
- 


\ TWO academic gatherings held simultaneously 


6 PREFACE 


The present modest contribution to the discussion 
of evolution has a threefold aim: to examine anew 
the present state of the evidence for biological evolu- 
tion including the descent of man; to point out the 
philosophy in which the theory of evolution naturally 
if not inevitably eventuates; and to study the rela- 
tions between this evolutionary philosophy and the 
theistic and Christian view of the world. It is clear 
that the relation between evolution and religion has 
become the leading apologetic problem of our age, 
and it is earnestly hoped that the following chapters 
will do something to clarify the issues involved, 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
I. Tue DARWINIAN REVOLUTION ....... 9 
Il. Tue Anti-DarwINIAN Reaction .... 19 

III. Can Betirer 1n Gop anp EvoLutTIon 
eT PLOGREEER eather iil mie 27 

IV. Gop In THE Gaps—THE ORIGIN OF 
they Wp OURS eS ene a Ra RU el Ae 39 
Mee ORICIN, OMAN iii, cate. Sat vee = VE 
VI. Tue BoNnEs AND THE STONES ........ vA 
WiLL VOLUTIONARY: DOUBTS 1.4 aleaneiiy eoiee 91 
VIII. Tue MetapHysicaL REVIEW ........ 107 
TX EVOLUTION AND: THE: PALL tigh oe es 123 
X. Evolution AND REVELATION ........ 147 
AL EVOLUTION AND MIRACLE 0606 cee: 165 
Mle MBIST AND EVOLUTION oo iei ecco ves 179 





CHAPTER I 


THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION 


“The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion 
of nations, the manners and morals of mankind, are all at the 
mercy of a new generalization.” —EMERSON. 


“One general law leading to the advancement of all organic 
beings,—namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the 
weakest die.” —DARWIN, 


“Darwin, by his discovery of the mechanical principle of or- 
ganic evolution . . . completed the doctrine of evolution and 
gave it that unity and authority which was necessary in order 
that it should reform the whole range of philosophy. Its most 
important initial conception is the derivation of man, by natural 
process from ape-like ancestors, and the consequent derivation of 
his mental and moral qualities, by the operation of the struggle 
for existence and natural selection, from the mental and moral 
qualities of animals. Not the least important of the studies thus 
initiated is that of the evolution of philosophy itself. Zoology 
thus finally arrives, through Darwin, at its crowning develop- 
ment; it teaches, and may even be said to comprise, the history 
of man, sociology and psychology,’"—Sir E, Ray LANKESTER, 


I 
THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION 


P NHREE great generalizations of science, the 


Copernican, the Newtonian and the Darwinian, 

have had a disturbing effect upon religious 
thought. The two polar problems in modern religious 
philosophy are man’s place in nature and God’s place 
in nature, and the teaching of Copernicus had an 
obvious bearing upon the first while that of Newton 
concerned the second. It remained for Darwin to pro- 
pose a theory so comprehensive as to have a vital 
bearing on both of these central problems of religious 
thought. 

When Alexander the Great pushed his conquests to 
the East, he assumed more and more the dress and 
habits of the Persians and to the disgust of his friends 
compelled even his Greek associates to pay him divine 
honors. In some such way the Darwinian theory of 
natural selection, as it conquered one after another of 
the provinces of human thought, took on more and 
more the character of a mechanical or materialistic 
philosophy and assumed to be the queen of the sci- 
ences and the master key to all knowledge. 

The religious tendencies of Darwinism, especially 
as it hardened into Neo-Darwinism, might be illus- 
trated by the inner logic of the theory itself, or from 
the statements of its most eminent spokesmen, or from 

11 


12 Tus CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


the consequences in the religious career of those who 
most ardently embraced it. There have not been lack- 
ing abundant warnings in the experience and in the 
utterances of Darwinians themselves that Darwinism 
has sounded the death knell of religion. 

With Darwin’s absorption in the advocacy of natu- 
ral selection, his religious convictions were atrophied, 
and his latest utterances showed his agnosticism alike 
as to the origin of the world and the destiny of man. 
In the case of a leading disciple, Romanes, the accept- 
ance of Darwinism led, for a long period at least, to 
a complete eclipse of faith and to the writing of a 
treatise designed to show that belief in God was no 
longer possible for intelligent men. Darwin’s most 
authoritative spokesmen in England, Huxley the bril- 
liant controversialist, and Spencer the systematic 
thinker, both exploited Darwinism in the interest of 
an agnostic metaphysic. In France Renan predicted 
as a result of Darwinism the gradual dying out of re- 
ligion, while at a later date Metchnikoff flatly declared 
that man, the progeny of the brute, shares his destiny. 

In Germany the two most prominent exponents of 
Darwin’s theories substituted materialism and mecha- 
nism for a theistic view of the world. Heckel in his 
youth was strongly religious and said in a letter: 
“There is nothing else in this enthusiasm for the mi- 
croscope and the cell but the happiness and delight in 
this immense and miraculous world of the infinitely 
small, in which the Creator has revealed His most 
wonderful power and wisdom” (“The Story of the 
Development of a Youth”), Later he could say that 


Tuer DARWINIAN REVOLUTION 13 


“with a single stroke Darwin has annihilated the 
dogma of creation,’ and he asserted that the theory 
of evolution, which he held in the Darwinian form, 
had given the coup de grace to the theistic postulates 
of God, freedom and immortality. Germany’s other 
most prominent Darwinist, Weismann, believed that 
the great riddle had been solved of the origin of what 
is suited to its purpose without the cooperation of pur- 
posive forces. The doctrine of evolution, he said, 
“supplies the keystone in the arch of our interpreta- 
tion of nature and gives it unity; for the first time it 
makes it possible to form a conception of a world- 
mechanism, in which each stage is the result of the 
one before it, and the cause of the succeeding one” 
(“The Evolution Theory,” 1904, I, pp. 6, 7). 

Darwinism presented a militant challenge to two 
of the fundamental doctrines of theism, those of crea- 
tion and design. It is true that Darwin retained in the 
various editions of his published work the allusion to 
the several powers of life as having been “originally 
breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” 
but this inconsistency or concession to prejudice has 
been removed with scant ceremony by later expositors. 
The leading disciples of Darwin have been and con- 
tinue to be hostile not only to special creation but to 
creation in general, and.they would agree with Heckel 
that the doctrine of descent means practically “the 
non-miraculous theory of creation’ (“History of 
Creation,” p. 422). 

The most obvious effect of Darwinism was to 
destroy the design argument in the form presented 


14 THe CHRISTIAN AND E,\voLUTION 


by Paley’s Natural Theology. Darwin carried by as- 
sault the two ramparts of Paley’s argument: first, 
that the adaptation of organ to use was everywhere 
so patent a fact that it could only be accounted for 
as being the intention of an intelligent (and benevo- 
lent) Creator; and, second, that each species was 
specially created and thus that the proof of wise and 
beneficent design was cumulative. Paley’s defenses 
were demolished when it was shown that the fortut- 
tous could account for the fit, that chance could mimic 
the work of design,.and that the only creation in the 
world of life—if any be grudgingly admitted—was 
that of one or more primordial germs of life. Chance, 
and in the popular mind a cruel chance, had been sub- 
stituted for beneficent design. 

Another and a practically momentous corollary was 
drawn from Darwinism in the moral sphere. If the 
descent of man is to be taken seriously, then con- 
science must be evolved from the instincts of the herd 
and the sense of obligation is resolved into expediency 
or social convention. What Darwin called “the im- 
perious word ought” (“Descent of Man,” I, chap. 4) 
loses its imperial quality when it is reduced to the 
level of instinct. There is no obligation, apart from 
social sanctions, for an individual to do what he does 
not wish to do. As Howison has said: “The so-called 
Philosophy of Evolution, when given such a scope as 
to make evolution the ground and explanation of mind 
in man, is destructive of the reality of the human 
person, and therefore of that entire world of moral 
good, of beauty, and of unqualified truth, which de- 


Tur DarwiINIAN REVOLUTION 15 


pends on personal reality for its being” (‘“The Limits 
of Evolution,” 1901, p. 6). 

Not only has the sense of obligation been weakened 
by the derivation of ethics from instinct, but there 
has been a transvaluation of values so that the ethics 
of the jungle and of the blond beast have been promul- 
gated under the egis of Darwinism. If a code of 
morals should be derived from nature as depicted by 
Darwin in one aspect of his theory, the first com- 
mandment of the law would be, “Survive; let the 
strong live, and the weak go to the wall.” The ethics 
of a Caiaphas, a Herod, or a Pilate may under cover 
of Darwinism be recommended as more authoritative 
than the ethics of Christ. 

Nietzsche, apostle of individualism and revolt, has 
been called “Darwin with a difference.” In spite of 
his ridicule of Darwin in his later years, there is no 
doubt that Darwin supplied Nietzsche with his philo- 
sophical basis. War as supremely exemplifying the 
struggle for existence was no longer excused as a re- 
grettable necessity but commended as the highest of 
duties. Nietzsche, who was Darwin in philosophical 
dress, certainly did much to sweep away the obstacles 
to militarism and to supply the atmosphere in which 
it could flourish and bear its choicest fruit. 

Before the world war, Bernhardi the militarist fell 
back on Darwin: ‘‘Wherever we look in nature, we 
find that war is a fundamental Jaw of evolution. This 
great verity, which has been recognized in past ages, 
has been convincingly demonstrated in modern times 
by Charles Darwin.” During the war Viscount Bryce 

2 


16 Tue CHristiAN AND Evolution 


said that German militarism found in the Darwinian 
doctrine of natural selection, the method of social and 
political progress (Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1916) ; 
and Professor Vernon Kellogg, after a period of free 
converse with German officers, says that the point of 
view of the German officer “is a point of view that 
will never allow any land or people controlled by it 
to exist peaceably by the side of a people governed 
by our point of view. ... It is a point of view that 
justifies itself by a whole-hearted acceptance of the 
worst of Neo-Darwinism, the Allmacht of natural 
selection applied rigorously to human life and society 
and Kultur” (Both in Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1917, 
pp. 146, 148). 

Bernard Shaw in his “Back to Methuselah” shows 
that the severest critics of Darwinism in its moral 
aspects are not to be found among the theologians. 
He says that ‘“Neo-Darwinism in politics had pro- 
duced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so ap- 
palling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write 
these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether 
our civilization will survive it’ (p. 9). “At the 
present moment one half of Europe, having knocked 
the other half down, is trying to kick it to death, 
and may succeed: a procedure which is, logically, 
sound Neo-Darwinism” (p. 10). 

Under the title of “Darwin the Destroyer,” a dis- 
ciple of Darwin, Gamaliel Bradford, has recently said: 
“It was Darwin, the gentle, the kindly, the human, 
who could not bear the sight of blood, who raged 
against the cruelty of vivisection and slavery, who 


TuHet Darwinian REVOLUTION 17 


detested suffering in men and animals, it was Darwin 
who at least typified the rigorous logic that wrecked 
the universe for me and for millions of others” (Harp- 
ers Magazine, Sept., 1926). 

The anti-religious tendency of Darwinism has not 
been confined to the sphere of philosophical theism or 
even of ethics, but the very citadel of Christianity as a 
system of doctrine and life has been assailed. Doubt 
has been thrown upon the authority of the Bible, upon 
the doctrines of sin and redemption and even upon 
the spiritual nature and destiny of man. Whatever 
elements favorable to theism a robust faith may find 
in Darwinism, its influence upon popular thought has 
been all the other way. For half a century it has 
been found in closest alliance with a philosophy which 
denies that this world is the product of the will and 
wisdom of God, and with a morality which substi- 
tutes the law of struggle and strife for the law of 
sacrifice and love. Judged by its fruits or historical 
effects, Darwinism has brought with it an anti-theistic 
philosophy and an anti-Christian morality. 





CHAPTER II 
THE ANTI-DARWINIAN REACTION 


“The more deeply I pursued the alleged evidence for it [the 
Darwinian theory] and sought to gain, through special investiga- 
tion, some essential proof of the. genetic relationships of animals, 
the more clearly I recognized that the theory is a seductive ro- 
mance, which deceptively pretends to give results and explanations 
rather than doctrine based upon positive foundations.”—ALsrrt 
FLEISCH MANN. 


“In the present work, we shall endeavor to show that Evolu- 
tion has long since degenerated into a dogma, which is believed 
in spite of the facts, and not on account of them.”—GEorcE BARRY 
O’ Toots. 


“The theistic evolutionist who tries to occupy a middle ground 
between those who accept the Bible account of creation and those 
who reject God entirely reminds one of a traveler in the moun- 
tains, who, having fallen halfway down a steep slope, catches 
hold of a frail bush. It takes so much of his strength to keep 
from going lower that he is useless as an aid to others. ‘Those 
who have accepted evolution in the belief that it was not anti- 
Christian may well revise their conclusions in view of the ac- 
cumulating evidence of its baneful influence.”-—Wim1.1AmM JENNINGS 
BrYAN, 


“The question in dispute is whether atheists and agnostics have 
a right to teach irreligion in public schools—whether teachers 
drawing salaries from the public treasury shall be permitted to 
undermine belief in God, the Bible, and Christ, by teaching not 
scientific truth but unproven and unsupported guesses which can- 
not be true unless the Bible is false,”—-WiLLIAM JENNINGS Bryan. 


IT 
THE ANTI-DARWINIAN REACTION 


T THE opening of the century an adjustment 
seemed to have been made and a sort of modus 
vivendt established between Darwinism and re- 

ligion. The scientific critique of Darwin had toned 
down or made less certain those elements in Darwin- 
ism which were most hostile to religion, the factors 
of chance and of cruelty, and it seemed possible for © 
a doctrine of descent to dwell in the same house with 
Christian theism, if not on terms of intimacy, at least 
without violent contention. Within the past few years 
the situation has rapidly changed. In the press and 
on the platform, in the pulpit and in ecclesiastical as- 
semblies, and in state legislatures and courts, Dar- 
winism and evolution have become the subjects of 
heated and prolonged debate. Darwinism in the two- 
fold sense of a doctrine of selection and a doctrine of 
descent has become news both in the secular and in 
the religious press, and it is evident that the whole 
subject of the relation of the Darwinian theory to 
religious thought has been reopened and the battle will 
have to be fought over again. 

The history of the Darwinian theory would cover 
its triumphal march over the field of biology and then 
the rapid extension of its conquests over other and 
remoter fields until there seemed to be no more worlds 

21 


22 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvOLUTION 


to conquer. The academic world has become “evolu- 
tion mad.” Everything must now be viewed from 
the evolutionary standpoint and the theory of descent 
is the magic key which will unlock the mysteries of 
the universe. Everything pre-Darwinian in biology, 
in philosophy, in theology, and even in logic and in 
morals must be thrown upon the intellectual scrap 
heap. Against this extreme position a reaction was 
to have been expected, and an increasing volume of 
protest has been made of late, both against the claims 
of evolution in outside fields and against the truth 
of evolution in its own field of biology. 

The anti-Darwinian polemic has taken two forms. 
In the first place there has been in recent years a grow- 
ing tendency among evolutionary scientists to chal- 
lenge or deny the sufficiency of the theory of natural 
selection to account for the origin of species, and in 
the second place a new and vigorous attack has been 
made upon Darwinism in particular and upon the 
whole evolutionary theory on the ground of its al- 
leged anti-theistic and anti-Biblical character. 

The indictment against Darwinism in its broader 
sense as a theory of natural selection and a theory of 
descent runs somewhat as follows: 

An anti-theistic philosophy, promulgated under the 
name of “the dominant category,” is poisoning the 
springs of religious faith in our youth; the whole 
critical movement which has made a jumble of the 
Old Testament and has discredited the Old Testament 
history and religion is expressly founded upon the 
theory of evolution; the skeptical criticism which 


THE AntiI-DARWINIAN REACTION 23 


seeks to eliminate the supernatural from the New 
Testament draws strength from the same source; the 
evolutionist with his denial of the fall and of the need 
of redemption aims at the heart of Christianity as a 
religion of redemption; the application of evolution- 
ary principles to ethics robs both conscience and the 
law of God of their authority. But when we examine 
the foundation upon which these consequences so dis- 
astrous to religion are built, we find them to be of the 
flimsiest character. Evolution, it is contended, is only 
an unproved and unprovable guess, and the theory 
has become so extended and so vague in its meaning 
as to lack scientific value; it is bound to fall by its 
own weight and is already in a state of collapse. 
Those who have engaged in this polemic have be- 
longed for the most part to the conservative or funda- 
mentalist wing of the church in America. Books and 
pamphlets which have been influential in the discus- 
sion have been Philip Mauro’s “Evolution at the Bar,” 
1922; Alfred Fairhurst’s “Organic Evolution Con- 
sidered,” 2d ed., 1913; A. W. McCann’s ‘“God—or 
Gorilla,’ 1922; George McC. Price’s “New Geology,” 
1923; “The Phantom of Organic Evolution,” 1925; 
L. T. Townsend’s “Collapse of Evolution,” 1922; 
W. H. Griffith Thomas’ “What About Evolution?” 
1918; and George Barry O’Toole’s “The Case 
Against Evolution,” 1925. | 
' The most popular leader of the anti-Darwinian 
crusade in America has been Hon, William J. Bryan, 
who has thrown into the movement all of his earnest- 
ness and his power of popular appeal. He has done 


24 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


much to bring the subject to the fore in ecclesiastical 
gatherings, in state legislatures and boards of educa- 
tion, and has made it a general topic of discussion 
throughout the country. In the Dayton trial Mr. 
Bryan with his opponent, Mr. Darrow, held the center 
of the world stage. His tragic death at the close of 
the trial stilled the voice of ridicule and had a sober- 
ing effect upon both parties in the controversy. 
Opponents of evolution have not always belonged 
to the fundamentalist wing of the church. A trench- 
ant argument against what is termed this “modern 
fetish” is made by Professor William H. Wood in his 
“Religion of Science,’ 1922, Professor Wood, in 
his attitude toward the Bible, miracles, and the like, 
is allied rather to the liberal or “modernist” group in 
the church, and yet he stoutly rejects evolution, de- 
claring that it is without proof, that it is destructive 
of religious belief, that theistic evolution is an illogi- 
cal combination, and that evolution is immoral in its 
consequences. He says on these points: “No animal 
ever has become a man as far as knowledge goes” (p. 
146). “There is no evidence that man as man has 
been evolved out of lower natural forms or organ- 
isms” (p. 149). “Evolution finds no supreme per- 
sonality in the universe” (p. 133). “The plain 
teaching of evolution is to deny personal immortality” 
(p. 156). “To reduce the dignity, the glory and the 
immortality of man to germ-cell eternity is to cut the 
nerve of progress, destroy civilization, open the door 
for all the animal traits and introduce the beast-like 
struggle which terminates in the survival of the 


THe AntI-DARWINIAN REACTION 25 


strongest. It would set back the clock of progress 
many thousand years” (p. 118). 

It has been a weakness of the anti-evolutionary cri- 
tique that it has been carried on largely by laymen in 
science whose testimony could be dismissed as incom- 
petent and as warped by theological bias, but a recent 
book by Professor Louis T. More, an educator of 
note, a specialist in physics and the author of scien- 
tific monographs and articles, is not open to this 
criticism. The title of his book, “The Dogma of 
Evolution,” 1925, puts the evolutionist on the de- 
fensive. He repeatedly charges the biologist with 
looseness of thought, and, speaking of Darwin, says 
that the physicist who is trained in habits of exact 
phraseology and rigorous logic is discouraged by “the 
loose language and the still looser reasoning of the 
evolutionist and the biologist” (p. 236). To express 
a doubt of the genetic connection of man, both body 
and soul, with the lower animals has been regarded 
as almost the unpardonable sin in academic circles, 
and the experts of the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science officially declared in De- 
cember, 1922, that “The council of the association 
affirms that the evidences of the evolution of man are 
sufficient to convince every scientist of note in the 
world.” It is now disconcerting to find Professor 
More saying bluntly that “the evolution of man from 
the lower animals” is “purely a matter of guess” (p. 
331). | | 

In spite of certain guarded concessions which Pro- 
fessor More makes to the evolutionist, his book in its 


26 THe CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTIon 


whole tone and animus might have been written by 
the most convinced creationist. The book is in fact 
a slashing critique of the evolution theory in its pop- 
ular forms. Professor More contends that the hy- 
potheses of natural selection, inheritance of acquired 
characters, mutations, and the like “are not proved 
and are really metaphysical and unverifiable in char- 
acter’; that these hypotheses “inevitably lead to a 
mechanistic philosophy in which the phenomena of 
life are to be explained by physical and chemical 
processes,” and that the expansion of biological evolu- 
tion to include the realm of consciousness and social 
and ethical life has created confusion and disaster. 
‘In its religious application, “the real tendency of 
evolution is to be found in the philosophy of Nietzsche 
and not in the life of Christ” (p. 383). 

Enough has been said to show that the revolt against 
Darwinism or evolution is not confined to any narrow 
circle within the church. The protest against the in- 
sufficiency of its evidence, the looseness of its logic 
and the anti-religious implications of its teachings has 
become vocal even within the halls of learning. In 
December, 1922, the experts of the American Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Science, Professors 
Conklin, Osborn and Davenport, declared in a state- 
ment that “the theory of evolution is one of the most 
potent of the great influences for good that have thus 
far entered into human experience.” It would have 
done more to allay popular agitation if these experts 
could have stated authoritatively that evolution was 
not anti-theistic in its tendency and was not opposed 
to the full acceptance of the doctrines of Christianity. 


CHAPTER III 


CAN BELIEF IN GOD AND EVOLUTION 
LIVE TOGETHER? 


»“T£ there be a personality behind the universe, what sort of 
‘personality is it? Let us think his thoughts after him for a 
moment: We see this creation moving up from low to higher 
forms, from a chaos of star dust to an ordered universe of stars 
and planets; on the earth, from inorganic to organic, from 
. crystal to vegetable, from vegetable to animal, from animal to 
human, until at last there comes the consummation of it all— 
personality. If this evolving universe has been headed toward 
anything, it has been headed toward personality. Can we sup- 
pose that, having finished this agonizing task, having completed 
at last His purpose—personality—God would toss it on the scrap 
heap as though He did not care for it at all, as though what He 
had wrought by the agony of a million years was but the caprice 
of a careless, passing whim?”—Harry Emerson Fospick, 


“The doctrine of evolution, rightly understood and interpreted, 
is today one of the most powerful aids to religious faith. It has 
delivered thousands from perplexity amounting to despair. It 
has supplanted the old paralyzing conception of a “world-ma- 
chine,’ a world mechanical and lifeless, grinding out human 
destiny without end. In place of that soulless mechanism we now 
have a growing organism. Science has shown us a universe alive, 
progressing, climbing with many backward steps toward “one 
far-off divine event.” ‘The doctrine of development has cleared 
away most of the difficulties in Old Testament ethics, and en- 
abled us to reconcile teachings which, given in different centuries, 
are yet united in one book. It has furnished the church with a 


powerful apologetic, which many of our leaders are now using.” 
—wW, Ei, yt FAUNCE 


Til 


CAN BELIEF IN GOD AND EVOLUTION 
LIVE TOGETHER? 


ARWIN, in the most striking and original 
aspects of his teaching, took God out of nature 
and put men into nature. He took God out 

of nature in two ways, by denying special creation 
of the different species and by denying that the vari- 
ous organs useful to the life of organic beings were 
the work of design. When he included man within 
the bounds of nature—now thought of as having no 
direct connection with the will and wisdom of God— 
he gave, it seemed, the coup de grace to the theistic 
view of the world. Whether man, “nature’s rebel,” 
would prove to be a disturbing element in his theory 
remained to be seen. 

It is a proof of the inherent vitality of theism that 
it has been retained and defended even by some of 
those who have accepted evolution in its Darwinian 
form. A brief review of the attempts which have 
been made to harmonize evolution and theism may be 
conveniently arranged under the familiar captions of 
Genesis and Geology, Darwinism and Design, and the 
ethics of evolution and Christian ethics. Various at- 
tempts have been made to reconcile the early chapters 
of Genesis with the biology of Darwin and the geol- 
ogy of Lyell. Many theologians and scientists have 

29 


een 


30 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


taken the Biblical account of creation as teaching 
moral and religious truth but under the form of ori- 
ental imagery, popular allegory, folklore myth, or 
frankly myth, perhaps borrowed from the Babylonians 
but purged of its polytheistic elements. When these 
chapters are so regarded, the conflict between Genesis 
and geology or biology is avoided, although to the dis- 
paragement of the Genesis narrative. Others have 
pointed out that the idea of succession and progress 
in the forms of life is found in Genesis and science 
alike, that the appearance of man is the culminating 
event in both, and that the order of events in Genesis 
is strikingly similar to that given by evolutionary sci- 
ence. Even Heckel said that “two great and funda- 
mental ideas, common also to the non-miraculous 
theory of development, meet us in the Mosaic hy- 
pothesis of creation with surprising clearness and 
simplicity—the idea of separation or differentiation 
and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. 
. . . We can therefore bestow our just and sincere 
admiration on the Jewish law-giver’s grand insight 
into nature’ (“History of Creation,” I, pp. 37, 38). 
Many Biblical students locate the geological ages 
before the six creative days began, that is between the 
first and second verses of Genesis 1. Thus C. I. Sco- 
field in his Reference Bible says: “The first creative 
act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all 
the geologic ages. Jeremiah 4: 23-26, Isa. 24:1 and 
45:18, clearly indicate that the earth had undergone 
a cataclysmic change as the result of a divine judg- 
ment. The face of the earth bears everywhere the 


BELIEF IN Gop AND EvoLuTION ial 


marks of such a catastrophe. There are not wanting 
intimations which connect it with a previous testing 
and fall of angels’ (p. 3). Dr. Scofield thinks the 
day in Genesis may mean a period. Vegetable germs 
may have been preserved in this catastrophe but ani- 
mal life perished. ‘“‘Relegate fossils to the primitive 
creation, and no conflict of science with the Genesis 
cosmogony remains” (p. 4). 

Similarly L. T. Townsend, D.D., gives the render- 
ing, “And the earth had become [past perfect tense] 
tohu, a wreck, and bohu, without inhabitant” (“Adam 
and Eve: History or Myth?” Boston, 1904, p. 81). 
There were no men before the ice age, which is prac- 
tically described by the words tohw and bohu, and 
after this the earth was rapidly prepared in the six 
creative days of twenty-four hours each for the habi- 
tation of man. This scheme of interpretation is that 
of John Bloore in his “Modernism and Its Re-State- 
ment of Christian Doctrine,’ 1923, and of S. D. 
Gordon in his “Quiet Talks About Simple Essentials,” 
1924. The latter declares that “there is no scientific 
difficulty in understanding such things being done in 
six common consecutive days, with God at work” (p. 
DO!) 3 

Another form of catastrophism is that defended by 
G. McC. Price in his “New Geology,” 1923. Price 

-with Howorth denies that there was any ice age or 
that large parts of America and northern Europe were 
at one time covered with an ice-cap. He refers the 
changes usually ascribed to glacial action to the action 

3 


32 Tuer CHRISTIAN AND EvoLUTION 


of the Flood, and thus believes that man was upon 
the earth before these changes took place. 

The Genesis and Geology debate has raised and still 
raises serious exegetical difficulties, but it may be 
maintained that these will be dispelled by increasing 
light from the sides of science and of Biblical inter- 
pretation. Professor Fairhurst remarks in speaking 
of the elaborate attempts which have been made to 
place the cosmogonies of Genesis and Geology side by 
side in detail: “I regard such efforts as a waste of 
labor. The one record is so general, and the other so 
imperfect, that we have no certain basis for detailed 
comparisons. If we cannot see that they perfectly 
harmonize, still, as shown above, we are not justified 
in asserting that they conflict” (‘Organic Evolution 
Considered,” 1913, p. 348). 

If there is no exact and detailed correspondence 
this may not be altogether a disadvantage, for if the 
Genesis account agreed exactly with the science of 
today it would be sure to disagree with the science of 
tomorrow. 

More serious for Christian theism was the Dar- 
winian attack upon the design argument. Darwin’s 
leading expounders were agreed that the design argu- 
ment had been demolished and Darwin really shared 
this opinion, although he confessed that his mind was 
in a muddle on the subject. That the Darwinism of 
today is still hostile to the admission of design in 
nature is shown by the statement of a latter-day Dar- 
winian, Julian Huxley, in his ‘Essays of a Biologist,” 
1923: “Darwin gave the deathblow to teleology by 


Beier in Gop AND EvoLuTIon 33 


showing that apparently purposive structures could 
arise by means of a non-purposive mechanism” (p. 
41). , 

The feature of Darwinism that was hostile or fatal 
to design was the assumption that chance could mimic 
design, that the fortuitous could evolve the fit, that, 
to quote again from Julian Huxley, “in pre-human 
evolution, the blind chances of variation and the blind 
sifting of natural selection have directed the course of 
evolution and progress” (op. cit., p. 11). 

A notable attempt to construct an argument for de- 
sign from Darwinian premises was made by John 
Fiske in his ‘Destiny of Man,” 1884. His.argument, 
carried on with marked literary skill, is that if man 
has come so far from origins so lowly it is reasonable 
to suppose that he will go further. Immortality, in 
fact, is but evolution at the end of its journey. If the 
long process ending in man has no meaning we are 
put to permanent intellectual confusion, and it can 
have a meaning only if the long chapters which tell 
of struggle have a fitting dénouement in a future 
existence in which man’s powers can be developed and 
his hopes and aspirations realized. ‘So far from de- 
grading humanity or putting it on a level with the 
animal world in general, the Darwinian theory shows 
us distinctly for the first time how the creation and 
the perfecting of man is the goal toward which 
Nature’s work has all the while been tending” (p. 25). 

For Henry Drummond and A. R. Wallace, as well 
as for Fiske, man was a standing argument for design 
in nature. “Ask the zoologist,” said Drummond in 


34 THe CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


his “Ascent of Man,” 1894, “what, judging from sci- 
ence alone, Nature aspired to from the first, he could 
but answer Mammalia—Mothers. In as real a sense 
as a factory is meant to turn out locomotives or clocks, 
the machinery of Nature is designed in the last resort 
to turn out Mothers” (p. 268). Drummond’s special 
place in the apologetic of evolution is that he strove 
to correct what he deemed the one-sided emphasis 
upon the struggle for existence as a factor in progress. 
He admitted that the first chapter or two of evolution 
might be headed the Struggle for Life, but the book 
as a whole was really a love story (p. 218). The 
struggle for life is only the villain of the drama, which 
is really a moral drama, and its hero is the struggle 
for the life of others. ‘The moral order, he insists, is 
a continuous line from the beginning (p. 26), and in 
the struggle of the plant to produce seeds and of the 
animal to beget offspring, and even perhaps in attrac- 
tion and chemical affinity we see the beginnings of that 
process which in the light of its outcome we see as the 
evolution of love. Purpose and a loving purpose take 
the place of a blind and cruel chance. 

The arguments of Fiske and Drummond, so far as 
they affect the place of man in nature, have been fol- 
lowed substantially by later evolutionary apologists. 
The essence of this apologetic is a principle as old as 
Aristotle that a thing or process is to be judged by its 
end, not its beginning—by the fruit, not by the root. 
The fact that the lily springs from the mud does not 
destroy the beauty of the flower. The lowly origin 
of man should not blind us to his essential nature. A 


Beier rin Gop AND EvoLuTION 35: 


man’s a man for a’ that (whatever his origin), with 
the capacities, the spiritual nature and the mighty 
hopes that make us men. The genetic continuity and 
connection of man with nature therefore, it is held, 
should exalt our views of nature rather than lower our 
estimate of man. As Pringle-Pattison has expressed 
it: “Man is organic to nature, and nature is organic 
foaman ldeq. of ,God,"\ p. 91/7) i+ Nature, out or 
which man arose, should be judged from the stand- 
point of man, not vice versa, and when so judged 
there is nothing in man’s natural or brute origin which 
shadows his title to his spiritual inheritance. Man in 
this view is not brutalized, but nature is spiritualized, 
and “the Nature of Darwin and Huxley and Mill be- 
comes the Nature of Wordsworth and Emerson” (D. 
S. Cairns, ‘‘Reasonableness of the Christian Faith,” 
acved: p.7-90)), 

In his later writings A. R. Wallace, co-advocate 
with Darwin of natural selection, finds design at three 
‘points in the evolutionary process. With Henderson 
after him and indeed with Paley before him, he finds 
teleology in “the existence of a special group of ele- 
ments possessing such exceptional and altogether 
extraordinary properties as to render possible the ex- 
istence of vegetable and animal life-forms’ (‘The 
World of Life,” 1911, p. 416). The Mind that 
caused these elements to exist must be millions of 
times greater than that which conceived and executed 
the steam engine. He further assumes that the most 
rational explanation of the world of life is the view 
that its end is “the development of intellectual, moral, 


36 Tus CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


and spiritual beings” (p. 341). Wallace would even 
reinstate design in the field of natural selection, hold- 
ing that the vast life world of variety, use and beauty 
“does absolutely require some non-mechanical mind 
and power as its efficient cause’ (‘World of Life,” p. 
423). 

Our three apologists saw an increasing purpose run- 
ning through organic nature and running up to man. 
Wallace frankly assumed special creation to account 
for man on the spiritual side; Drummond less defi- 
nitely brings in the action of Environment (with a 
capital E)) in producing man and he says that “in- 
stead of abolishing a creative Hand, Evolution de- 
mands it” (op. cit., p. 329); while Fiske says that 
man dichotomizes the whole universe—man on one 
side and the whole universe on the other. 

It must be acknowledged, however, that there has 
always been a tension between evolution and theism, 
and that as evolution has “evolved” the tension has be- 
come greater rather than less. No scientific evolutionist 
of note, so far as observed, now advocates the Wallace 
theory of a spiritual influx or special creation at the 
appearance of man. On the other hand, in the class- 
ical exposition of theistic evolution, Le Conte’s “E;vo- 
lution and Its Relation to Religious Thought,” (2d 
ed., rev., 1916), the author while claiming to be and 
intending to be a theist, acknowledges that by the line 
of thought he follows “we are carried strongly in the 
direction of pantheism” (p. 336). In whatever field 
he covers, the consistent evolutionist will not admit 
any intrusion, or influx of spiritual forces into the 


BELIEF 1N Gop AND EvoLuTION 37 


stream of natural events. God may be postulated as 
a distant Originator in a deistic sense of the natural 
process or as a sort of spiritual underpinning of all 
existence in a pantheistic sense, but God is not allowed 
to act effectively and directly either in nature or 
human history. If in the beginning, He is only in the 
beginning; if in all things, He is in all things indis- 
criminately and so in nothing particularly. The in- 
evitable tendency is uniformly to sacrifice the tran- 
scendence which theism requires to immanence. From 
biology and equally from anthropology and psychol~ 
ogy and religious history the supernatural must be 
banished. What theism loses in this process is pre- 
cisely what distinguishes it from competing systems of 
thought. 

To link up with evolution a system of Christian 
ethics is equally difficult. ‘Tennyson can sing in classic 


phrase,— 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 
But he can say in another mood, 


If my body come from brutes, my soul uncertain, or a fable, 
‘Why not bask amid the senses while the sun of morning shines? 


And Alfred Noyes can sing, 


Down with Reticence, down with Reverence—forward—naked— 
let them stare. 


Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men; 
Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again? 


If evolution has any ethical imperative it may well 
be one that is suggested by Darwin's rule for the ad- 
vancement of all organic beings, “Multiply, vary, let 


38 THe CHRISTIAN AND EwoLuTIon 


39 


the strongest live and the weakest die.” Nature may 
indeed say, “Be good,” but with Sir Leslie Stephen 
we may hear her say in an emphatic aside, “Be not 
too good.” ‘Those groups of men who reverence and 
obey what W. James calls “the ethics of infinite and 
mysterious obligation from high” may indeed have 
an advantage in the struggle for existence, but no way 
has yet been shown how such an ethics can spring 
from evolutionary soil. 

Evolution, as we shall see more fully later, natu- 
rally gravitates toward that monistic naturalism which 
is proving to be the home of leading evolutionists in 
the twentieth as it was in the nineteenth century. 
When the philosophy of evolution is by pious and 
well-meaning hands introduced into the citadel of 
Christianity, it proves to be a Trojan horse which has 
within it forces that are destructive alike to ‘Christian 
theism and Christian morals. 

The recent sensational advances in physical science 
have pointed to a conception of matter as energy, and 
ultimately even as will, which is in harmony with a 
spiritual interpretation of the universe. In the mean- 
time it cannot be said that twentieth century biology 
is making any positive contribution to religious 
thought. It is not likely to do so until biological 
science shakes itself loose from the philosophical dog- 
matism of the nineteenth century. 


CHAPTER IV 


GOD IN THE GAPS—THE ORIGIN 
OF LIFE 


“If God is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where 
shall we be when these gaps are filled up? And if they are 
never to be filled up, is God only to be found in the disorders of 
the world? ‘Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point 
here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget 
that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. 
If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically. If He 
comes upon the scene at special crises He is absent from the 
scene at intervals. Whether is all-God or occasional-God the 
nobler theory? Positively, the idea of an immanent God, which 
is the God of evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional 
wonder-worker who is the God of an old theology.”—Hznry 
DRUMMOND. 


“Whoever claims to have succeeded in making living matter 
from inanimate will have to prove that he has succeeded in pro- 
ducing nuclein material which acts as a ferment for its own 
synthesis and thus reproduces itself. Nobody has thus far suc~ 
ceeded in this, although nothing warrants us in taking it for 
granted that this task is beyond the power of science.”—JAcguxEs 
Lors. 


“With regard to the dawn of life it does not follow, as has 
often been pointed out, that although biogenesis is the only known 
law of reproduction today, the conditions requisite for abiogen- 
esis have never occurred. We cannot say definitely what these 
conditions were, yet we can be tolerably certain that the lands 
and, particularly for this purpose, the seas of late Archzean times 
were very different from any modern conditions, terrestrial or 
marine. ‘They are conditions that will never return, and are not 
humanly reproducible. The belief in such a natural origin of life 
is an exigency of thought.”"—JAmrEs Y. SIMPSON, 


IV 


GOD IN THE GAPS—THE ORIGIN 
OF LIFE 


-@ STRANGE place to find God. “As if God lived 
A in gaps,” as Drummond exclaims. As if God 

who fills all things is to be looked for in dis- 
continuities and exceptions rather than in the majestic 
sweep of His laws operative throughout the universe. 
Does not the very title of our chapter place theism in 
a humiliating and precarious position? If God is to 
be looked for in the exceptions, the implication is that 
He is not to be found in the ordinary ongoings of 
nature, and the danger always is that the gaps will 
be filled up and thus no place will be left for God at 
all. Certainly the theism that looks for God in the 
gaps alone is in a dangerous position while the sci- 
entists are busily attempting to fill up the gaps, and 
the philosophers are minimizing their importance, and 
even sober theologians like Bishop Gore are telling us 
that “we shall not, if we are wise, lay stress on the 
gaps in the scientific story of creation, or build on the 
conviction that living matter could not have evoived 
out of what had no life, or rationality out of animal 
mind” (“Belief in God,” 1923, p. 58). 

Before dismissing as trivial and unworthy of atten- 
tion the argument that stresses the gaps or breaks in 
nature, let us look a little closer at the state of the 

41 


42 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvvoLUTION 


question. We may remind ourselves that evolution 
in its modern form was at first a scientific hypothesis 
to account for resemblances between species, but that 
the idea of genetic relationship was rapidly extended 
downward into the inorganic sphere and upward into 
that of human life and history. The theory of evo- 
lution itself thus quickly “evolved.” It was readily 
transformed from a scientific hypothesis into a philo- 
sophical dogma, as it passed from the realm of em- 
pirical science into that of speculative philosophy. 
Evolution thus easily and perhaps logically became 
identified with a monistic view of the universe, or 
with a theory of divine immanence which looked 
askance at all breaks, gaps, interventions or intrusions, 
whether in nature or in the origin, life and history 
of man. 

The question of the gaps in natural and human his- 
tory is, as a matter of fact, important both to the 
scientist and the theologian. Evolutionists of stand- 
ing are free to confess that they have compunctions 
of conscience when they use the word evolution in a 
broad and vague sense to cover the inorganic, the liv- 
ing, and the consciously purposive. As T. H. Morgan 
says: “What has the evolution of the stars, of the 
horse and of human inventions in common? Only 
this, that in each case from a simple beginning through 
a series of changes something more complex, or at 
least different, has come into being. To lump all 
these kinds of changes into one and call them evolu- 
tion is no more than asserting that you believe in 
consecutive series of events (which is history) caus- 


THE OricIn oF LIFE «43 


ally connected (which is science)” (“A Critique of 
the Theory of Evolution,” 1916, p. 6). 

Unfortunately for clearness of thought and preci- 
sion of language it has become not unusual to apply 
the word evolution to all three realms—to the Domain 
of the Inorganic, the Realm of Organisms and the 
Kingdom of Man—indiscriminately and to the con- 
nection between them, so that we even meet with the 
statement that “evolution demands” that life was 
evolved from the inorganic by a natural process. The 
only way in which the same word can with propriety 
be used of the three distinct spheres is to deny their 
distinctness, and reduce them all to the same level. 
This can be done by a leveling down process in the 
case of materialism, or by regarding all three spheres 
indiscriminately as an expression of the divine life as 
is done by pantheism. We cannot look for “God in 
the gaps,” because in the one case there are no gaps 
and no God, and in the other case God is to found 
everywhere in such a sense that He is to be found no- 
where in particular. 

From the theistic standpoint again the question of 
God in the gaps is not unimportant, in spite of the 
fact that the word is so short and the problem is often 
spoken of with disdain. It is indeed when it is broadly 
considered the question whether God is active in His 
world at all in any personal and preferential sense. 
The question of God in the gaps is at bottom the ques- 
tion of the supernatural. 

The two most obvious gaps or breaks in the natu- 
ral process are at the origin of life and the origin of 


44 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


man. We speak of the solar “system,” but there is 
no question here of a self-preservative and conative 
organism stich as meets us in the simplest forms of 
life. How did life originate in a lifeless world? 
There are two possible answers: first, there were cer- 
tain elements existing in the inorganic world whose 
physical or chemical actions and interactions produced 
life; or second, life was introduced into the inor- 
ganic world by some power outside of that world. 
Life was evolved; or life was created. ‘There is no 
a priori reason for believing in one of these methods 
rather than the other. Before the days of Pasteur, 
spontaneous generation used to be accepted as an 
axiom on the ground that decaying meat bred maggots 
and dirty rags would soon swarm with life. ‘Today 
we are more apt to hear that the natural evolution of 
life from the lifeless is an exigency of thought. The 
fact is that there is plenty of analogy in experience 
for both methods—the method of the production of 
new forms from preéxisting elements and the method 
of new results from the insertion of a new element 
into an existing complex. 

In nature we have the unfolding of the seed—first 
the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn on the 
ear—but we have also the new put into the old, the 
leaven hid in the three measures of meal, till the 
whole is leavened. The bread will not rise unless the 
leaven is put in. Is the inorganic world the seed of 
the organic? Or is it the meal into which a principle 
of life must be introduced before there can be growth? 
There is plenty of analogy for both; and it is a ques- 


Tue Oricin oF Lifs 45 


tion of evidence in the individual case. Results 
reached by the slow and careful methods of science 
will command more confidence than the impatient as- 
sertion of a popular champion of evolution, Joseph 
McCabe, who says: “E’very scientific authority in the 
world now believes that life was naturally evolved 
from the chemicals of the early earth. Everything 
that we can satisfactorily study was evolved, etc.” 
(“A’B C of Evolution,” 1921, p. 29). ‘The plea 
made by Benjamin Moore (in his “Origin and Nature 
of Life,” 1912) that the search for the natural origin 
of life has had beneficent results and has led to the 
greatest discovery in medical science will be dis- 
counted when we reflect that as a matter of fact this 
discovery—that of antiseptic surgery—was the out- 
come of Pasteur’s experimental disproof of sponta- 
neous generation. 

Since the experiments of Pasteur the problem of 
the origin of life has become acute. Evolutionary 
scientists have become more and more monistic in 
their philosophy. Heedless of Darwin’s admission of 
the creation of primordial germs and Wallace’s as- 
sumption of creative power to explain the higher en- 
dowments of man, the modern evolutionist in regular 
standing assumes as axiomatic that each stage of 
existence passes continuously into another stage with- 
out spiritual influx from without. On the experi- 
mental side, however, the advocates of abiogenesis 
have met with constant defeat. A sober statement is 
that of L. L. Woodruff, in his “Evolution of the 
Earth and Its Inhabitants”: “We thus reach the gen- 


46 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


eral conclusion that, so far as human observation and 
experimentation go, no form of life arises today except 
from preéxisting life” (p. 93). Geddes and Thomson 
say: “It is plain, therefore, that the doctrine of the or- 
igin of the living from the non-living cannot be held at 
present with a clear or easy mind” (‘Evolution,” 
1911, p. 71). And J. S. Haldane says: “Evolution 
or no evolution, there is not the remotest possibility 
of deriving the organic from the inorganic” (‘‘Mech- 
anism, Life and Personality,” 2d ed., 1921, p. 100). 
One of the most interesting chapters in modern 
science is furnished by the attempts which have been 
made by evolutionary scientists to bridge the gap be- 
tween the lifeless and the living and to bring the ori- 
gin of life within the range of general law. With 
commendable patience and industry they have tried 
to make life in the laboratory—without success thus 
far; they have tried to imagine the antecedents or 
causes out of which life has sprung; they have sought 
for a formula, such as the action, reaction and inter- 
action of Energy, which will bridge the gap between 
the living and the lifeless; they have spoken of a 
Law of Complexity which will endow lifeless matter 
with the attributes of life; they have fixed upon a 
substance, imaginary or real, such as the ill-starred 
Bathybius of Huxley or the modern colloid substance, 
out of which life is supposed to have sprung; they 
have referred the production of life to a series of 
lucky accidents; they have sought to escape the prob- 
lem by referring the origin of life to other planets 
or by saying that life is eternal; they have declared 


THE Oricin’ oF Lire 47 


the period in which life arose to be unique and the 
conditions of its origin to be unreproducible; they 
have even postulated a continual production of or- 
ganisms below the range of microscopic vision from 
the inorganic sphere today; they have explained the 
unknown by the more unknown by saying that life is 
brought forth in every mother-earth in the universe 
in the maturity of its development. 

These various attempts to bring the origin of life 
within the domain of general law are not without 
variety and ingenuity, but in general they are specu- 
lative rather than scientific. They may be roughly 
arranged in three classes: (1) Theories which hold 
that life is being produced now from the non-living; 
(2) theories which maintain that life is not produced 
now but that it was formerly under conditions that 
cannot be reproduced, and (3) theories that hold that 
life was never spontaneously produced on the earth 
but that it came from some other planet or that it is 
eternal. The first theory, that of Scheffer in his 
presidential address (See Science, Sept. 6, 1912, pp. 
294ff.), is that instead of the eternity of life (Arrhe- 
nius) or the spontaneous generation of life but once 
under inaccessible conditions (K. Pearson and others) 
or the meteoric conveyance of life to our planet (Lord 
Kelvin), life is constantly being produced and has 
always been produced from certain colloidal sub- 
stances which he describes. He admits, however, that 
these countless beginnings of life have left no trace 
discoverable in the paleontological series or discern- 
ible now to the most delicate instrument. “Life” of 

4 


Ag Tor CHRISTIAN AND EvoLution 


a certain kind may be constantly produced, but it is 
not the kind that has, it is assumed, evolved into the 
countless living forms which now clothe and people 
the earth. 

If it be said that there is now no thoroughfare be- 
tween the lifeless and the living, but that the line was 
crossed in the remote past under conditions which 
cannot be reproduced or even with any certainty 
imagined, we are again in the region of pure specula- 
tion carefully removed from possible scientific proof 
or disproof. In fact so slender a bridge that it could 
be crossed but once—at one period or even in one 
instance—lacks the required stability of a general law. 
If the gate to life is so straight and narrow that it 
could be passed but once under conditions impossible 
to reproduce or imagine, the origin of life is removed 
from the region of customary behavior or uniform 
sequence of antecedents and consequents, and the 
theory has no advantage for scientific purposes over 
an agnostic theory or one of special creation. 

To assume that life as we now know it had no be- 
ginning or that it was brought to the earth by some 
meteorite is directly opposed to the scientific prob- 
abilities. Weismann, for instance, does not think that 
a germ of life could be conveyed within the crevices 
of a meteorite, because “it could neither endure the 
excessive cold nor the absolute desiccation to which it 
would be exposed in cosmic space, which contains 
absolutely no water” (“The Evolution Theory,” II, 
p. 365). 

It is safe to say that these theories, aside from their 


THE Oricin oF Lire 49 


being mutually destructive, have not bridged the gap 
between the living and the lifeless. If life is made in 
the laboratory we shall be curious to see of what sort 
it is and whether it can maintain itself in the struggle 
for existence. In the meanwhile the choice is between 
creative power and a miracle of speculative ingenuity 
or of rhetoric. 

The problem is not simplified by altering the defini- 
tion of life as is done by Luther Burbank when he 
says that “Life really exists as an organized force in 
all growing crystals; below even these we find in- 
stead of the organized growth seen in crystals, an 
amorphous life. Both crystals, the amebz and other 
protozoan forms, respond definitely to some of the 
forces of Nature, such as gravity, heat and light; in 
other words, have the quality of positive and negative 
reactions—a limited power of choice, and from such 
faint prophecies of life, just emerging from the realm 
of chemistry, have come during zons of time, all the 
varied plant and animal life on this earth, including 
man himself’ (Condensed from ‘Evolution and Va- 
riation With the Fundamental Significance of Sex,” 
Ppraly-2). 

It is equally useless in solving the scientific problem 
to have recourse to a metaphysical hylozoism, which 
endows all matter with a form of life, or to adopt the 
parallelism of Spinoza as is done by Lloyd Morgan 
in his “Emergent Evolution” (1923). In the latter 
case life is “an emergent chord and not merely due to 
the summation, however complex, of constituent 
notes,” i. e., could not have been predicted from the 


50 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


fullest possible knowledge of the physical-chemical 
elements (p. 6). There is no “special insertion ab ex- 
tra’ —no “‘alien influx into nature’; divine Activity is 
omnipresent, for “God, if in any, is in all, without 
distinction of entities’ (p. 13). Morgan would sub- 
stitute the conception of “relatedness” for that of 
agency or efficient cause, but no help is given in this 
conception in explaining why life emerged at one time 
rather than at another. 

_The most pretentious attempt to account for the 
origin of life on naturalistic principles is that of Pro- 
fessor H. F. Osborn in his “The Origin and Evolu- 
tion of Life” (1918). The lay reader will not see 
what is gained by the formula of the action, reaction 
and interaction (or the capture, storage and release) 
of Energy. If the word Energy is used in a more 
mystical sense, meaning the Infinite Energy of the 
Universe or the Energy from which all things pro- 
ceed and which wells up in consciousness, we are in 
the realm of metaphysics, and the discarded idea of 
special divine Activity might even be concealed within 
the term. This of course is not Osborn’s meaning, 
but it may still be objected that he uses the term 
energy in an indefinite sense. He even speaks of “the 
actions, reaction and interactions of living energy” 
(p. 7), as if he would build the bridge between the 
lifeless and the living out of the various meanings that 
might be assigned to the word energy. He admits 
that for the present the theory that accounts for the 
origin of life from physical causes is speculative and 
is philosophy rather than science. The question goes 


THE OricIn oF Lire 51 


back to the more ultimate question of the nature of 
life—“Whether it is solely physicochemical in its 
energies, or whether it includes a plus energy or ele- 
ment which may have distinguished LIFE from the 
beginning” (p. 281). Professor L. T. More after a 
lifetime spent in investigating the phenomena and 
laws of physics confesses that he can find no meaning 
in the statements of those who correlate biological 
and psychological with physical phenomena. To make 
out his case, it is maintained, even Professor Osborn 
is guilty of a “reckless disregard of physical law,” 
and “either willingly or through inability to compre- 
hend the elementary laws of physics, invents his own 
physics” (p. 269). 

In spite of Osborn’s discussion the fact remains that 
from all that we know of lifeless matter it does not 
produce life, and from all that we know of living 
organisms they are not produced by lifeless matter. 
Recent researches into the nature of life, and the 
structure of the cell and the phenomena of heredity, 
have increased the difficulties of a doctrine of abio- 
genesis. As E. B. Wilson says in his “The Cell in 
Development and Inheritance” (2d ed., 1900): ‘“I‘he 
study of the cell has on the whole seemed to widen 
rather than to narrow the enormous gap that sepa- 
rates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic 
world” (p. 434). 

Recent investigation has further increased the dif- 
ficulty of the doctrine of spontaneous generation by 
bringing to light “the chemical complexity of the food 
of even the simplest protozoa or bacteria.” Life must 


52 Tue CHRISTIAN AND EvoruTIon 


apparently exist before the chemical elements neces- 
sary to sustain life could be utilized. If mysteriously 
one day a living cell floated on the face of the waters, 
it would, without a sort of double miracle, have no 
chance of living or of finding nourishment. 

Modern research has exposed more and more the 
mysteries of heredity but has made it increasingly 
difficult for the physicochemical theorist to explain 
them. ‘The real problem of life,’ says a physician 
scientist, Dr. W. Hanna Thomson, in his ‘‘What is 
Physical Life?’ “is how the microscopic single cell, 
with which each individual among the metazoa begins, 
should virtually contain not only all the structural 
peculiarities of the body of its parent without varia- 
tion from its hereditary pattern, but should also have 
the power to determine where the untold millions of 
cells to grow from it are to find their proper places in 
the future adult body. What combination of physics 
and chemistry could produce this thing, when the in- 
conceivably complex internal makeup of such a micro- 
cosm as that single primordial cell cannot be conceived 
of even by metaphysicians?” (pp. 99, 100.) 

J. S. Haldane, not a vitalist, argues strongly in his 
“Mechanism, Life and Personality” (2d ed., 1921) 
that the mechanistic theory makes “a gigantic leap in 
the dark” in identifying stimulus and response with 
physical or chemical cause or effect (p. 32), and he 
concludes that “the phenomena of life are of such a 
nature that no physical or chemical explanation of 
them is remotely conceivable” (p. 64). Of the germ- 
plasm or nuclear germinal substance he says: “We are 


THE Oricin oF Lire 53 


thus forced to the admission that the germ-plasm is 
not only a structure or mechanism of inconceivable 
complexity, but that this structure is capable of divid- 
ing itself to an absolutely indefinite extent and yet 
retaining its original structure’ (pp. 56, 57). There 
is no need to push the analysis further. “The mech- 
anistic theory of heredity is not merely unproven, it 
is impossible” (p. 58). 

It is natural that philosophers who can admit no 
real creation and no preéxistent Creator will find the 
idea of a supernatural hiatus between the inorganic 
and the organic “unphilosophical.’”’ How then is the 
obvious gap to be filled in? <A. S. Pringle-Pattison, 
in his “The Idea of God” (1917), has a way of evad- 
ing the difficulty which is not open to the scientist. 
The question of the origin of life is of no philosophi- 
cal importance because the question of “sooner or 
later in a particular time series” (p. 98) is indiffer- 
ent to philosophy. Philosophy is concerned only with 
the question of intrinsic nature or value, and ‘‘the 
temporal view of things cannot be ultimate” (p. 383). 
It is to be observed, however, that the author does 
not regard the time-succession as irrevelent in evaluat- 
ing the place of man in nature. He says that man is 
“the last term in the series” (p. 110), and that “it is 
the emergence of intelligence . . . which supplies the 
final term, the goal or consummation of the evolution- 
ary process” (p. 111). The fact is that temporal suc- 
cession is of the very essence of the evolution theory, 
which is often defined as the theory that the present 
is the child of the past and the parent of the future. 


54 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


If time is an illusion the difficulties of evolution are 
not solved, but the whole process collapses. 

Our review of the problem of the origin of life 
justifies us in accepting the opinion of a biologist, 
Julian Huxley, that “of the first origins of life we 
know nothing and guess little’ (“Essays of a Biolo- 
gist,” 1923, p. 17), and the statement of an astrono- 
mer, TI. C. Chamberlin, in closing his work on ‘The 
Origin of the Earth’: “The emergence of what we 
call the living from the inorganic, and the emergence 
of what we call the psychic from the physiologic, 
were at once the transcendent and the transcendental 
features of the earth’s revolution.” It may be un- 
wise to stake the fortunes of theism upon a special 
theory of the beginnings of life on this planet, but 
we are safe in saying that there are at present no 
ascertained facts to prevent our referring the origin 
of life directly to the creative power of God. A full- 
orbed theism which believes in the transcendence of 
God over nature and in His creative power will be 
slow to believe that that power was exhausted in its 
initial exercise. 

If God is to be found only in the gaps He is an 
absentee God conceived in a deistic fashion; if He 
can only act through general laws, His action is never 
free, personal and direct and He is conceived in a 
pantheistic fashion. A theism which stresses the per- 
sonality of God will look for God in general laws 
which He has established in His providence for the 
government of the world, but will look for Him as 
well in those “big lifts” in nature by which He pre- 


THE OnriciIn oF LiFs 55 


pares the way for the life of intelligent creatures, in 
those special arrangements of His providence in ac- 
cordance with which He makes all things work to- 
gether for good for those who love Him, and, in a 
sinful world, in those provisions of His grace in which 
His own love for His children is specially revealed. 





CHAPTER V 


THE ORIGIN OF MAN 


“These religions [Judaism and Christianity] have unnaturally 
severed man from the animal world, to which he essentially be- 
longs, and placed him on a pinnacle apart, treating all lower 
creatures as mere things; whereas Brahminism and Buddhism 
insist not only upon his kinship with all forms of animal life, 
but also upon his vital connection with all animated Nature, bind- 
ing him up into intimate relationship with them by metempsy- 
chosis.”—-SCHOPENHAUER, 


“For him [Darwin] the soul of man is no whit less the off- 
spring of that of animals than is his body. Our psychic powers 
are new dispensations of theirs. The ascending series of grada- 
tions is no more broken for the psyche than for the soma. ‘The 
gaps are no wider or more numerous from the lowest to the high- 
est in the one than in the other. The affinities and analogies 
are as close, and the soul inherits as much from our venerable, 
brute forbears as does the body.”—G. Stanitey Hatt, 


“Thou hast made him but little lower than God, 
And crownest him with glory and honor. 
Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; 
Thou hast put all things under his feet; 
All sheep and oxen, 
Yea, and the beasts of the field, 
The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, 
Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.” 
—Psaum 8. 


ti 
THE ORIGIN OF MAN 


F THE evolution theory had not been extended 
to cover the origin of man, it would have pos- 
sessed merely an academic interest. When it 

was made to include the genesis of man it was trans- 
formed from a scientific hypothesis, such as the molec- 
ular theory of gases or the wave-theory of light, 
into a philosophy of the universe. 

Such an extension of the theory became inevitable 
when man was included within its scope. When man 
is brought under the sway of evolution every product 
of man’s thought is likewise included, and evolution, 
a jealous mistress claiming all or nothing, becomes 
the dominant category, and every theory of the uni- 
verse which man has constructed is itself the product 
of evolution. Darwin himself said that he ‘would 
give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Se- 
lection” if a difference in kind was admitted between 
man and the animals so that man was excluded from 
the sway of selection. The inclusion of man within 
the compass of evolution—of man as a thinking, lov- 
ing, worshipping being—brings within its compass all 
of man’s arts, sciences, philosophies, morals and re- 
ligions. Every achievement of art, every discovery 
of science, every imperative of morality, every insight 
of philosophy, every aspiration of religion—including 

59 


60 Tue CHRISTIAN AND EvoLUTION 


the framing of the evolution theory itselfi—was due to 
forces resident in the animals below and before man, 
and ultimately to the properties of the primordial liv- 
ing germ; in fact were all latent in the last analysis 
in “a fiery cloud.” 

The method of evolution is to explain the more 
evolved by the less evolved, the later and higher 
phases of existence by the earlier and lower, the moral 
by the non-moral, the conscious by the unconscious, 
and at length the living by the lifeless. The logician 
may object to the method of evolution as fallacious, 
but as long as the method—the explanation of the 
higher by the lower—is in vogue, the tendency of evo- 
lution is to explain moral and religious phenomena 
by the non-moral and non-religious, and evolution 
logically eventuates in a materialistic or at least a 
naturalistic philosophy of life. 

In spite of this tendency it is sometimes said that 
the question of man’s origin has no interest for the 
moralist or theologian. The questions of origin and 
nature, or origin and destiny, are different questions 
and man is what he is, with his hopes, aspirations, re- 
sponsibilities and endowments, whether his origin be, 
in Lyell’s words, from “mud or monkey.” The lily 
is pure and the rose beautiful even though they have 
their roots in a damp and moldy soil. “A man’s a 
man for a’ that,’ and if man is genetically related to 
nature this should raise our conception of nature 
rather than lower our estimate of man. 

Those who are familiar with the logic of evolution 
and the tendency of evolutionary writers know per- 


Tur OriciIn oF Man 61 


fectly well that the evolutionary view of man has made 
a difference and does make a difference in the answer 
we give to the question, “What is man?” ‘The ques- 
tion of pedigree or descent is important and very im- 
portant to the heir presumptive to a throne or a for- 
tune. Is man free? Has he kinship with the Divine? 
Has he a personality which will outlast the stars? 
The evolutionist inevitably throws the weight of his 
theory into the scales in answering these questions. 
He can account for man more easily if all of man’s 
actions are determined by his physical environment. | 
He can establish a descent from the brute more easily 
if he assumes that man has a destiny in common with 
the brute. If man on the other hand is a free being 
in a world of moral responsibility, a child of God 
(even if a prodigal child) and an heir to an immortal 
destiny, he cannot in his essential being be assimilated 
to the brute. He is different in kind as well as in 
degree. Naturalistic evolution must here confess its 
limitations or else be supplemented by principles which 
transcend if they do not contradict it. Evolution can- 
not account for the soul, and the only alternatives are 
to deny the soul, or to deny evolution, or at least to 
deny that the soul in its origin was subject to the oper- 
ation of evolution. 

It is not surprising that an evolutionist like Wal- 
lace (who retained his religious faith) should confess 
these limitations of evolution or natural selection: 
that an evolutionist like Darwin (who lost his reli- 
gious faith) should limit the mental powers of man, 
holding that man with his lowly origin was incompe- 


62 Tuer CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTION 


tent to judge high questions of the existence of God 
and immortality; or that an evolutionist like Romanes 
(who first lost and then regained his faith) should in 
the middle period assimilate the mind of man to that 
of the brute, and afterward confess that he had taken 
too little account of human nature. Wallace held that 
the mathematical, artistic, moral and spiritual endow- 
ments of man “clearly point to the existence in man 
of something which he has not derived from his ani- 
mal progenitors—something which we may best refer 
to as being of a spiritual essence or nature’ (‘“Dar- 
winism,” 1891, p. 474). Wallace pointed to a “spir- 
itual influx” —the béte noir of later evolutionists—as 
the cause of these spiritual endowments. 

The Wallace theory, it may be pointed out, has af- 
finities which make it not unattractive to Christian 
theism. It maintains at once the transcendence of 
man over nature and the transcendence of God over 
nature and man—two essential articles of the Chris- 
tian creed. Again, as in the Incarnation there was a 
union of the supernatural—the miraculous conception 
—with the natural processes of pre-natal and post- 
natal growth and birth, so in the origin of man there 
may have been the cooperation of what we call natu- 
ral and supernatural forces. The coming of the First 
Adam and that of the Second Adam would thus be 
strikingly assimilated. 

But the Wallace compromise, while appealing to a 
number of people, has proved to be difficult to hold in 
the face of the fire it has drawn from both sides, It 
is significant that the severest criticism has come from 


Tue OricIn oF Man 63 


the evolutionary side. Ridicule has been poured upon 
the Wallace view as teaching that “our brains are 
made by God and our lungs by natural selection.” It 
is not strange that a theory that is so frank in its ad- 
mission of the supernatural in the origin of life and 
of man and of the spiritual in the endowments of man 
is anathema to the orthodox evolutionist. It is en- 
tirely opposed to what are called “uniformitarian evo- 
lutionary principles,’ and its adoption would threaten 
the evolutional philosopher with the loss of his fairest 
possessions. If the characteristics of man which are 
essentially human, his powers of thought and speech, 
his creative faculty in art, his moral and religious 
sense—are not the product of a naturalistic evolution, 
then evolution will no longer sit as queen of the sci- 
ences claiming to dominate theology itself. ‘Then the 
psychological and moral phenomena, and what man 
has achieved in history and art and science and re- 
ligion, can be studied independently according to their 
own appropriate rubrics, and evolution will then have 
to take a modest place. Then the tension between a 
logic which tries to interpret evolution and test its 
premises and its evidences, and a logic which is the 
product or servant of evolution, will be at an end. 
The evolutionist is tempted to minimize the differ- 
ence between the minds of men and animals. We 
may scale down the prerogatives of humanity nearer 
to the level of the brute. We may say that the mind 
of man is scarcely capable of dealing with the high 
themes of God and immortality, or may even dismiss 
the trinity of beliefs in God, freedom and immortality 
5 ; 


64 THe CHRISTIAN AND EvoLUuTION 


as superstitions happily dispelled by the light of sci- 
ence. Man may thus be assimilated to nature, but it 
is to be observed that the man so assimilated is first 
carefully stripped of his distinctively human and spir- 
itual inheritance, of those mighty hopes which make 
us men. ‘The previous question is, What is man? 

It is more usual to magnify the intelligence of ani- 
mals. The animal mind when examined and experi- 
mented with is seen to have remarkably human qual- 
ities, the animal in fact must have some points of 
contact and communion with man, or the animal could 
not serve man in his work or delight him in his play. 


Dumb animals, perhaps,—Who knows? 
Are not as dumb as we suppose. 


In the sphere of instinct, mysterious enough in it- 
self, the animal seems to possess powers superior to 
man. The bird after its winter flight returns exactly 
to its summer nest in the far north; the homing pi- 
geon carried for hundreds of miles it knows not 
whither flies with unerring accuracy to its destination; 
the eel travels even thousands of miles up the inland 
river to return thence in order to spawn in the deep 
waters of the ocean. Insects such as the ant and the 
bee have an elaborate and highly specialized life and 
supply examples of industry which man may well 
follow. 


You may “eulogize” the animals, as some compar- 
ative psychologists are said to do, and may leave the 
witness box to become attorney for the defense, but 
the fact remains that there is a difference broad and 


Tue Oricin of Man 65 


deep between the mind of man and the mind of the 
animal. A man may be ignorant and degraded, “a 
mere animal,” as we say, but homo alalus—the man 
without speech—has never been found, and no race 
of men has been discovered incapable of education. 
The Terradelfuegans discovered by Darwin and at 
first said by him to be incapable of civilization are a 
classical instance. You may on the other hand edu- 
cate a pig to play euchre, or a parrot to talk in parrot 
fashion, or a walrus to play baseball, or a monkey to 
eat with a knife and fork, or an elephant to dance, 
but the limit of educability is quickly reached. In 
spite of these polite accomplishments the fact remains 
that no animal has language, or can to any extent use 
abstract or conceptual thought, or, so far as we can 
tell, has a moral sense, or a religion; while no race 
of men has been found without language, without 
powers of reasoning, without a moral code and some 
belief in God and a future life. 

Those who magnify the capacity of animals usually 
narrow the gap between animals and man by certain 
metaphysical or psychological assumptions. The 
transition is easier for the behavioristic psychologist 
because the behavior of animals and men are more 
alike than their thoughts. Again if consciousness be 
regarded as the effect of matter or the accompani- 
ment of matter in a rigid parallelism, then the path ~ 
leading from the animal to man is made smoother. 
The soul of course is correspondingly discounted. 
Again if the investigation assumes continuous de- 
velopment, the phenomena will fit in with it more 


66 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTIon 


readily. Thus in the well-known words of Lloyd 
Morgan: “It is of course true that the laws of inor- 
ganic development are not the same as the laws of 
organic development: and equally true that the study 
of mind introduces us to a new aspect of the develop- 
ment process. Notwithstanding these obvious differ- 
ences, the evolution that sweeps through nature is, I 
believe, one and continuous” (“Introduction to Com- 
parative Psychology,” p. 332). Here the monistic 
evolution which is assumed is the thing to be proved 
by the comparison of the minds of men and animals. 

The difference between man and the animal, so 
strongly emphasized on the intellectual side, becomes 
even greater when we consider the spheres of morals 
and religion. Here again the tendency of evolution- 
ary writers is to make the way easy for evolution by 
slicing off the characteristically human in man’s make- 
up—his freedom and his sense of obligation, and to 
reduce morality to social convention. We have seen 
how Darwin treated the imperious word ought when 
he reduced obligation to instinct. When we start with 
“the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from 
on high,” the evolutionist is at a standstill. It has 
never been successfully shown how the tendency to 
promote the health of social tissue can evolve moral- 
ity, or how “the categorical imperative can be hatched 
from evolutionary eggs.” A late writer on ethics 
complains that “the typical philosophy of science, with 
all its talk about evolution, has been in a real sense 
anti-evolutionary. What it calls evolution is only the 
shifting of unchanging elements in a more or less 


THE ORIGIN oF Man | 67 


continuous direction; by no chance does genuine 
novelty ever come into existence” (Arthur K. Rogers, 
“The Theory of Ethics,” 1922, p. 101). 

No more doughty champion of evolution ever lived 
than Thomas Huxley, but he said of man that 
“whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of 
themy: (Man's Place in ‘Nature,’ p. 87) 3. and in 
spite of his automatism in his theory of mind and 
matter and his agnosticism in religion he declared in 
ringing words that “the ethical progress of society 
depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less 
in running away from it, but in combatting it” (‘‘Evo- 
lution and Ethics,” p. 34). Even Bishop Gore, who 
would not insist on the gaps, makes the biggest kind 
of a gap here when he contends throughout his book 
for the reality of human freedom, and for the “frank 
recognition of moral will as here directive of physical 
force’ (“Belief in God,” p. 235), and links up the 
question of freedom with that of miracle: “I think 
we shall find that the question of the reality of freedom 
... and the question of the credibility of miracles are 
at bottom one and the same question” (p. 234). 

We come back inevitably to the question, What is 
man? Is he a mere thing,:an object of nature among 
other natural objects, a transient link in a natural 
process, a raindrop between the clouds of birth and 
the ocean of,death? Or is he above nature, a child of 
God, an heir to an immortal destiny? If the latter, 
then the roots of his enduring personality and of his 
spiritual endowments must be sought in the eternal 
world. They must have arisen not from the lair of 


68 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


the wild beast, but from the bosom of God. Man, 
psyche as well as soma, can plausibly be made out to 
be the offspring of the animal only when first despoiled 
of his spiritual and distinctively human inheritance. 

All evolutionists who believe in an immortal destiny 
for man must bring in somewhere (even if they have 
to smuggle it in somewhat shamefacedly) a sort of 
spiritual influx or special creation supplementing their 
naturalistic account of man’s genesis. If they insist 
that “man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible 
stamp of his lowly origin,” they are constrained to 
admit that in the framework of his mind and moral 
nature he bears the indelible stamp of his spiritual 
origin which he cannot have received from the brute. 
Thus Dr. Wm. W. Keen in his “I Believe in God and 
Evolution,” 1922, speaks the language of naturalistic 
evolution until the end of his book when he declares, 
“Bodywise, man is an animal, but, thanks be to God, 
his destiny is not the same as the beasts that perish” 
(p. 98). And of the drama of human life he de- 
clares: “In its dawn we see man groping his way to- 
ward the light; then slowly, but surely developing his 
intellectual life; and finally—how or when we know 
not now, but doubtless shall know in the future, in the 
immortal life—the engrafting by the Creator upon his 
bodily life a moral and spiritual life, a soul with a de- 
sire to worship, a faculty of adoration of communion 
with his heavenly Father” (pp. 98, 99). 

Professor L. M. Sweet, if we understand the argu- 
ment of his ‘To Christ Through Evolution,” is charge- 
able with a like inconsequence. He first rejects the 


Tus Oricin oF Man 69 


Wallace theory because of its “vicious dualism” and 
because it will not be acceptable to consistent evolu- 
tionists (pp. 204, 205), but then virtually returns to 
it in the conclusion that “man made his appearance 
by an act of God, and by a sudden upward leap, de- 
velopmental in the sense that it involved a directive syn- 
thesis of processes already in operation throughout 
the animal kingdom and an inherited organic basis, 
but creative in the sense that it was not contained, 
and therefore that it cannot be explained, by anything 
which went before” (p. 274). 

To spell Environment with a capital E, as is done 
by Drummond and his successor, James Y. Simpson, 
will not solve the problem. An animal cannot respond 
to a spiritual Environment without a miracle. The 
difficulties of the evolutionist at this point are well 
shown in Simpson’s ‘“Man and the Attainment of Im- 
mortality.” He attempts to make the transition be- 
tween ‘“‘man-like ape” and “ape-like man” without any 
breach of continuity, but Omnipotence (if we may say 
so reverently) cannot make an immortal being out of 
an animal without a miracle. Simpson in fact recog- 
nizes this when he defends a theory of conditional 
immortality. Man as the product of evolution is not 
immortal, only “immortable.” 

It is idle to explain the spiritual by the natural and 
the attempt to do so leads necessarily to the denial 
of the spiritual. Man as a spiritual being cannot be 
forced into the mold of a naturalistic evolution with- 
out first being subjected to a drastic paring down 
process, “Nature” cannot produce a being that will 


70 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvWoLuTION 


endure after nature has passed away. Man, body and’ 
soul (or body, soul and spirit, if you adopt the Scrip- 
tural distinction between the psychical and the spir- 
itual) cannot at the same time be the offspring of the 
beast by natural generation and the child of God and 
the heir of immortality. If you believe that man is 
made in the image of God and has an immortal des- 
tiny you must bring in spiritual influx or special crea- 
tion somewhere, even if you smuggle it in under cover 
of evolutionary terms. If on the other hand you re- 
gard the whole man as the result of a purely natural 
process, you logically and inevitably lower your view 
of man’s capacities and endowments. To deny the 
supernatural in man’s origin is to deny the spiritual 
in man’s nature. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE BONES AND THE STONES 


“The Old Testament opens with man made in the image of 
God, and the New Testament opens with God in the image of 
man.’’—Davin LIVINGSTONE. 


“There is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth 
them understanding.”—Jos. 


“In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like 
creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix 
on any definite point when the term ‘man’ ought to be used. But 
this is a matter of very little importance.’—DARwWIN, 


“The question of the Descent of Man is in a realm somewhat 
beyond exact science, and philosophical criticism should be wel- 
come, especially in its scrutiny of the terms in which the scien- 
tific verdict is stated.”—J, ArtnHur THOMSON. 


VI 
THE BONES AND THE STONES 


as that of the origin of man it is not surprising 
that prejudice has played a part. On the one 
hand there is the principle of continuity and unbroken 
succession, the fundamental assumption of evolution- 
ary philosophy; and on the other hand there is the 
popular prejudice against relationship with the ape 
or with any other animal. 
It has been suggested that the prejudice against re- 
lationship between man and the animal may not be 
all on one side. Thus Faber, the hymn writer, says: 


[* THE discussion of so momentous a question 


I heard the wild beasts in the wood complain, 
Man’s scent the untamed creature scarce can bear 
As if his tainted blood defiled the air. 


On the other hand John Kendrick Bangs voices a 
popular sentiment when he sings: 
Whate’er my forebears may have been, 
Ape, insect, bird, flesh, fowl, or fin, 
I am MYSELF, and, rain or shine, 
Intend to fill the place that’s MINE. 
Say what you will, prove what you can, 
About the Origin of Man. 
No line of monkey ancestry 
Can make a monkey out of me. 


The older evolutionists, such as Darwin and 
Heckel, had no hesitation in tracing man’s descent to 
73° 


74 Tur CHRISTIAN AND E,voLuUTION 


a monkey or an ape, but the newer science is more 
soothing to man’s amour propre and has relieved to 
some extent the sentimental objections—in deference, 
McCabe insists, to the “spiritual police’—to man’s 
simian ancestry. Our poor relations do not trouble 
us if they are far enough away, and there is senti- 
mental relief in the view of most modern authorities 
that man is not directly descended from any known 
animal, simian or otherwise, and that even his hypo- 
thetical ape-like ancestor lived hundreds of thousands 
of years ago and that his whole species is now ex- 
tinct. It is a comfort to know that our immediate 
“poor relations” are now dead, and a half million of 
years or more is surely enough to remove the bar 
sinister and to establish beyond doubt man’s title to 
his human dignity and his spiritual inheritance. 

Is not this relief on the sentimental side purchased 
by a weakening in the chain of evidence which con- 
nects man with the brute? The evolutionist of today 
is intent upon maintaining two theses, which may be 
expressed in the words of Professor J. Y. Simpson: 
“First, that man cannot possibly have ascended from 
any of the living anthropoid apes; second, that the 
only tenable explanation of the measure of commun- 
ity of physical structure that exists between the two 
groups is their origin by a process of natural evolu- 
tion from a common ancestor’ (“Man and the At- 
tainment of Immortality,” p. 45). 

The evolutionist, it is apparent, has placed himself 
in a difficult position logically. ‘The more evidence 
there is for one of his theses, the less evidence there 


Tur Bones AND THE STONES 75 


is for the other. If it is absolutely certain that man 
is not descended from the ape, why can we be certain 
that they are related at all? On the other hand if 
genetic relationship is certain, why do we have to go 
back of any known species of man or ape in order to 
find it? : 

But let us examine the objective evidence, from 
human skeletal remains and artifacts, that man was 
once ape-man or man-ape. The antiquity of man will 
not help the evolutionist unless ancient man was more 
ape-like than any race of men existing today. 

Anthropologists know that some of the evidence 
must be discounted because of the obvious tendency 
to exaggerate the age of the bones or implements dis- 
covered. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, of the Smithsonian In- 
stitute, has said that his division has repeatedly been 
called upon to investigate discoveries of human re- 
mains in America of supposed great antiquity, but 
that they have been found to be the bones of children, 
of animals, or of Indians of a modern type. On the 
other hand when a skull of modern structure is found 
in old formations there is a tendency to pass over the 
evidence. The famous Calaveras skull and the Galley 
Hill skeleton are cases in point. The Calaveras skull, 
according to R. S. Lull, was found embedded in “‘gold- 
bearing gravels of undoubtedly Pliocene age,” but the 
man to whom it belonged “is not supposed to have 
been contemporaneous with the gravels” (‘‘Evolution 
of Man,” 1922, p. 9). So of the Galley Hill skull, 
found in gravel which Keith thinks is 200,000 years 
old, but so modern in its features that most anthro- 


76 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTION 


pologists do not regard it as ancient. Keith thinks 
that we might meet the Galley Hill man on the streets 
of London today and pass him by unnoted (“Ancient 
Types of Man,” 1911, p. 32). The search is for re- 
mains with undoubtedly ape-like characteristics im- 
bedded in undoubtedly ancient formations, and the 
question is whether such evidence is really forthcom- 
ing. 

A careful review of the evidence adduced is called 
for, and we can do no better than to accept the guid- 
ance of a recognized authority, H. F. Osborn, who 
summarizes the evidence in popular form in a recent 
number of the Asia magazine. He says that the case 
for human evolution today rests “upon the discovery 
of numerous links in the long chain of ascent, which 
are either in the direct path of our ancestry or in a 
very nearly direct path. In the order of ascent, these 
great discoveries of our forebears, the first five in the 
list belonging to the Age of Man and the sixth to the 
Age of Mammals, are as follows: Cro-Magnon man, 
the last cave men found in western Europe; Neander- 
thal man, the first of the cave men found in western 
Europe; Heidleberg man, in the midst of the river- 
drift period, found in western Europe; Piltdown 
man, at the beginning of the river-drift period, found 
in Sussex, England; Trinil half-man, also at the be- 
ginning of the river-drift period, found in Java; Fox- 
hall man, known only by his implements and his 
fireplaces, found in Norfolk, England” (‘‘Where Did 
Man Originate?” Asia magazine, June, 1924, p. 427). 
The age he assigns to these—the estimates are given 


THE BonkEs AND THE STONES ri 


as “only opinions, not facts’—are as follows: “Cro- 
Magnon man, 25,000 to 40,000 years; Neanderthal 
man, 30,000 to 60,000 years; Heidelberg man, 400,- 
000 years; Piltdown man, 500,000 years; Foxhall 
man, 600,000 years” (ibid., p. 430). 

We are now concerned not with the antiquity of 
man but with the evidence for genetic relationship 
with the animal. If, as Keith supposes, a man similar 
in form and faculties to a modern Londoner lived on 
the banks of the Thames 200,000 years ago, this in 
itself would carry us no nearer to animal ancestry. 
Let us see how well Osborn’s six races (including the 
Trinil ape-man) qualify as candidates for the posi- 
tion of links in human evolution from the animal. 

1. The Cro-Magnon race, “preceding our own race 
by from ten to twenty thousand years” (p. 431), were 
at least our equals and probably our superiors in brain 
capacity and mental powers. “With a body like our 
own,’ says Osborn, “and a brain at least as large as 
ours, superior individuals of this race would have been 
capable of becoming senior wranglers at any of our 
modern universities’ (p. 431). In another place 
Osborn says that the Cro-Magnon man was “our 
equal, if not our superior in intelligence” (“Evolution 
and Religion,” 1923, p. 20). The Cro-Magnon race, 
in this case, whatever its age, carries us rather away 
from the animal than toward the animal. 

2. ‘The Neanderthal race is described by Osborn as 
“low-browed men with many characters of the head 
and jaw suggestive of the anthropoid apes” (p. 431). 
We are now dealing, as in the case of the Cro-Magnon 


78 Tuer CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


man, with actual skulls and skeletons which, while 
their age may be in dispute, were undoubtedly old, 
and can be compared, without resorting to an imagin- 
ative reconstruction, to the skulls of men living in our 
time. The relation of the Neanderthal race to modern 
man has been variously described. The Neanderthal 
man has been said to be (1) of the same species as 
modern man; (2) as the stock from which all modern 
races have arisen; (3) as later in appearance than 
the modern man (thus Keith reversing his former 
opinion), in which case the Neanderthal man might 
be degenerate; (4) as a separate species of men—a 
side branch not on the line of descent of modern man, 
and becoming extinct without leaving descendants. 
In none of these cases, except the second, which is 
now abandoned, can the Neanderthal man be regarded 
as one of the “numerous links in the long chain of 
ascent” of man. 

The original Neanderthal skull, found in 1856, has 
been variously estimated as to its brain capacity, but 
the finding of a number of nearly complete skulls and 
skeletons, belonging to the same type and classified 
under the term Homo Neanderthalensis, show in their 
structure and the conditions in which they were found 
that they belonged undoubtedly to human beings and 
not to any. intermediate form. In stature they were 
about like the modern Japanese. In culture they were 
like backward modern races: “The Tasmanians were 
found in a stage of flint industry very similar to that 
practised by the Neanderthals in Mousterian times” 
(Osborn, “Men of the Old Stone Age,” 1916, p. 234). 


Tur BonES AND THE STONES 79 


Their burial customs showed belief in a future life. 
As Simpson says: ‘‘Mousterian man assuredly knew 
the use of fire; he buried his dead; he believed in a 
hereafter; he is, in short, not merely a reasonable, 
but clearly a religious, being” (“Man and the Attain- 
ment of Immortality,’ p. 114). And Osborn says of 
the Neanderthal man that we have “evidence of his 
belief in a future existence” (“Evolution and Re- 
ligion,” 1923, p. 20). His physical characteristics are 
paralleled among the Australians and Eskimos today. 
His brain capacity on the average is equal to that of 
the modern white races. It is even held by some 
authorities, as by J. Elliot Smith, that the Neander- 
thal man has lost some primitive characteristics which 
still persist in modern man. Since there are plenty 
of parallels both structurally and culturally to Nean- 
derthal man, he has clearly proved an alibi; he can- 
not be one of the “numerous links” in human ascent 
from the brute. 

When the next three links in Osborn’s chain of 
ascent are studied we are struck by four facts: (1) 
we are dealing with very fragmentary remains; (2) 
in the reconstruction of these remains and the infer- 
ences drawn from them (differing greatly with dif- 
ferent authorities) imagination rather than the objec- 
tive evidence plays a predominant part; (3) there is 
an immense and unbridged interval—about 350,000 
years if we take Osborn’s figures—between the latest 
of these links and the Neanderthal race; and (4) 
there is uncertainty about the age of the strata in 
which the remains were found. 

6 


80 Tue CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTIon 


3. Of the Heidelberg race, which some place earlier 
and some later than the Piltdown man, and some make 
contemporary with him, there remains only a single 
lower jaw bone found near Heidelberg in 1907. From 
a single bone of known species the comparative anat- 
omist may be able to reconstruct approximately the 
entire skeleton, but it is different with a bone of what 
is claimed to be a new species—Homo Heidelberg- 
ensis. Osborn indulges in prophecy when he says that 
“probably in all other characters of the skull, as they 
become known, the Heidelberg race will be found to 
be a Neanderthal in the making, that is, a primitive, 
more powerful, and more ape-like form’ (“Men of 
the Old Stone Age,” p. 100). His own photograph 
of an Eskimo jaw (p. 100) is strikingly like the 
Heidelberg jaw, and both are unlike the jaw of the 
apes. It scarcely strengthens the evidence when 
Osborn declares that “all agree that Schcetensack’s 
discovery affords us one of the great missing links 
or types in the chain of human development” (p. 101). 

4. Going back, still with Osborn, another 100,000 
years, we come to the Piltdown man, Eoanthropus 
Dawsont. Professor A. L. Kroeber thinks that of the 
fragments of brain, small portions of the face, nearly 
half the lower jaw and some teeth found at different 
times in 1911-13, the age, brain capacity and com- 
patibility of the jaw and the teeth with the pieces of 
the skull, are so uncertain that it is unsafe to build 
large conclusions upon the discovery, and that “the 
claim of the discoverers that the Piltdown form be- 
longs to a genus distinct from that of man—Eoan- 


Tut BonkEs AND THE STONES 81 


thropus—is to be viewed with reserve’ (“Three 
Essays,’ pp. 15, 16). Similar doubts are expressed 
by Sir E. Ray Lankester in Wells’ “Outline of His- 
tory,” who says: “We must remember that this patch 
of gravel at Piltdown, clearly and definitely, is a 
wash-up of remains of various later tertiary and post- 
tertiary deposits. . . . I think we are stumped and 
baffled!) The most prudent way is to keep the jaw 
and the cranium apart in all arguments about them” 
(vol. 1, p. 46). That Osborn himself is quite at sea 
as to the reconstruction of these Piltdown bones is 
shown in the second edition of his work, “Men of the 
Old Stone Age,” 1916, where he says that “we must 
regard this as being the most primitive and ape-like 
human brain so far recorded; one such as might 
reasonably be associated with a jaw which presented 
such distinctive ape characters” (pp. 140, 141). Yet 
on page 144 he says that the jaw has been restudied 
and referred with “considerable certainty” to an adult 
chimpanzee; and on page 512 says that doubts about 
the jaw have been “entirely confirmed” by the study 
by Gerritt S. Miller, Jr..—a result which “deprives 
the Piltdown specimen of its jaw and compels us to 
refer the skull to the genus Homo rather than to the 
supposed more ancient genus Foanthropus!’ Not- 
withstanding all this the Piltdown man, jaw and all, re- 
appears in his article in the Asia magazine in 1924, 
duly authenticated by a photographic representation, 
with no hint of these disagreements among scientific 
men, and, singularly enough, with his age increased 


82 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


from an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 years in 1916, 
to 500,000 years in 1924. 

5. Even more tenuous is the evidence for an inter- 
mediate race of beings between man and ape in the 
case of the Trinil Ape-man, Pithecanthropus erectus. 
At different times in 1891-92, Dubois found in a river 
bed in Java a skull cap, two molar teeth and a femur, 
from the study of which he concluded that (1) The 
four skeletal pieces in question were contemporaneous ; 
(2) they were of the age of the stratum in which 
found; (3) they belonged to one skeleton; and (4) 
they represented a transitional form of beings between 
the anthropoid apes and man, belonging to the direct 
line of the genealogy of the latter.” Dubois himself 
said that “Pithecanthropus erectus is the transition 
form between man and the anthropoids which the laws 
of evolution teach us must have existed. He is the 
ancestor of man’ (as quoted Osborn, of. cit., p. 75). 
All the four conclusions drawn by Dubois have been 
disputed by competent scientists, and the brain capac- 
ity indicated by the skull-cap is also in dispute. It is 
now usually given as 900 cc., less than that of all but 
the lowest human races. While an “immense litera- 
ture” has grown up around Pithecanthropus, the 
strange thing is that the finder has concealed the bones 
even from other scientists for over thirty years. 
Hrdlicka speaks of it as regrettable that specimens so 
valuable to science should not be made freely acces- 
sible after twenty years had elapsed (See Smithsonian 
Publication 2300, p. 10), and that “not only the study 
but even a view of the originals are denied to scien- 


Tuer BonFs AND THE STONES 83 


tific men,”’ It is to be noted that Osborn in his “Men 
of the Old Stone Age,” 2d ed., 1916, and in his pop- 
ular article in the Asia magazine makes no mention 
of the fact that his large inferences to the existence 
of a race of beings intermediate between ape and man 
is founded upon concealed and inaccessible evidence. 
_7 Now at length after thirty years as reported in the 
| press (Literary Digest, Sept. 22, 1923) the specimens 
have been examined by scientists, and Dr. Hrdlicka 
reports: “None of the published illustrations or the 
casts now in various institutions are accurate. Espe- 
‘ cially is this true of the teeth and thigh bone. ‘The 
new brain-cast is very close to human. The femur 
is without question human.” Most of the discussion 
has plainly been conjecture based on inaccurate in- 
formation. 

In the press of December 28, 1925, Dr. W. B. Scott 
of Princeton reports the reception from Dr. Dubois 
of a plaster cast of the Pithecanthropus fragments 
from which he concludes that they indicate too large 
a brain capacity for any man-like ape, and belong to 
a being who was “distinctively a human of a very 
low grade.” If Pithecanthropus was a human being 
he was not a link between man and ape, and if con- 
fident assertions continue to be made about “the pre- 
human Trinil race of Java” they will have to be » 
discounted.* 

6. Of the Foxhall man of 600,000 years ago there 
are no skeletal remains but his existence is assumed 





*The press of Sept. 29, 1926, reports that a complete skull of an_al- 
leged ‘“‘missing link’’ has been found in Java by a tch scientist, Pro- 
fessor Heberlein. Fuller information will be awaited with interest. 


84 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


from the chipped flints and fireplaces found in early 
strata. The history of the paleolithic period in 
Europe is usually divided into periods, named after 
the localities in France where primitive flints were 
found—Chellean, Acheulian, Mousterian, Aurigna- 
cian, etc. Chipped and polished flints found in river- 
drift deposits and in association with the bones of 
extinct animals are undoubtedly ancient, while their 
age is variously estimated; but they give no substan- 
tial evidence of a subhuman or a prehuman race. 
Traces of a stone age can be found all over the world 
among both ancient and modern races. Australians 
and New Zealanders were in the paleolithic stage of 
culture when first discovered. The Tasmanians were 
even lower in the scale. As Osborn says (as quoted 
in the Yale volume, 1922, p. 3): “The native ‘Tas- 
manians, of whom the last survivor died in 1877, were 
in a stage of culture which some have called Eolithic 
and others a rather early stage of the Paleolithic, per- 
haps Mousterian.” It is the opinion of E. B. Tylor 
in his “Early History of Mankind,” that a comparison 
of stone implements ancient and modern “breaks down 
any imaginary line of severance between the men of 
the Drift and the rest of the human species.” 

The question whether there is evidence for an 
eolithic stage of culture earlier than the palzolithic 
is still in dispute, but the tendency is to deny that the 
eoliths are of human manufacture. The action of 
cart wheels, of concrete mixers and of stone crushers 
produce shapes similar to the eoliths, and in fact the 
eoliths if regarded as of human manufacture prove 


Tur Bones AND THE STONES 85 


too much about the antiquity of man. The eoliths are 
not specially more plentiful just before the opening of 
the palzeolithic period than they were earlier. “It was 
found that eoliths occur in lower strata than the 
earliest Pleistocene, namely in the Pliocene, in the Mio- 
cene, and perhaps even earlier, in the Oligocene. Yet 
these periods are divisions of the Tertiary, or Age of 
Mammals—the age before man had evolved! In 
short, the argument cuts too far’ (A. L. Kreeber, 
“Three Essays,” 1922, p. 33). 

A temperate statement by an evolutionist indicates 
the present state of the question in scientific circles. 
The expressions that indicate doubt or uncertainty are 
italicized: “Jt is pretty well agreed that the anthropoid 
apes and man came from a common ancestor, and he 
in turn from some primitive, broad-nosed ape. Some 
believe that the mammals were evolved from a primi- 
tive reptilian form. Others say they came from the 
amphibians, which in turn evolved from a fish form, 
the latter from an invertebrate, and so on down to the 
‘protozoa. Evolution must likewise assume that under 
some favorable condition the earliest living forms 
\were evolved from the inorganic world. Whether 
such a process is going on at the present no one knows. 
However, the facts of man’s development, structure, 
and variations, which have been given above, certainly 
can be best explained on the basis of man’s descent 
from lower forms, and human fossils, as far as they 
go, as is clearly shown in the previous chapter, defi- 
nitely lead back toward a form from which both apes 


86 THE CHRISTIAN AND E,vOLUTION 


and man may have descended” (‘“The Evolution of 
-Man,” Yale lectures, 1922, pp. 78, 79). 

The evolutionist is on thin ice when he attempts to 
tell us the actual process by which the anthropoid an- 
cestor developed into man. This occurred, according 
to Professor Simpson, in the western section of the 
plateau of Thibet when the primitive, common ances- 
tors of men and the apes were compelled by the dry- 
ing up of the forests due to the uplift of the Himalayas 
to descend to the ground—‘“that first fall to rise.” 
Three possibilities were before these arboreal anthro- 
poids: they must migrate, change their life habits, or 
become extinct. The first method was adopted by the 
anthropoid apes which moved southward to regions 
of greater warmth and easier food supply. The sec- 
ond method was that of seeking food upon the ground 
-—‘a desperate and hazardous adventure for arboreal 
forms during a period which was in many respects the 
zenith of mammalian carnivorous life” (op. cit., p. 
78). But this adventure and entrance into a new en- 
vironment “with its challenging stimuli and beckon- 
ings resulted in further mental advance.” The new 
activities reacted upon the brain and “the steady 
growth of the brain reacted upon the general shape 
of the face and skull.” Given sufficient time for the 
process and anthropoid becomes anthropos and man 
has evolved. 

In similar vein Joseph McCabe says in his “A B C 
of Evolution,” 1921: “It has been suggested that per- 
haps our ancestors lived in forests in certain parts of 
Asia, and that, owing to the rise of the land and in- 


Tue BonkEs AND THE STONES 87 


creasing dryness of the atmosphere, the forests disap- 
peared. Many reasons could be imagined. In any 
case, you will have no difficulty in seeing that such a 
descent from the trees will sharpen the wits. On the 
ground a sharper watch must be kept for enemies. 
...-Physiologists work out the effect on the brain 
of all these changes.” He adds rather naively that 
“if you allow at least half a million years to reach 
the level of the lowest savages from the level of the 
chimpanzee, you will realize that this suffices” (pp. 
ei BS Bn is BA ; 

Other scientists find the cause of human evolution 
in the change from a vegetable to a meat diet, or in 
the assumption of an upright posture and the free use 
of the hands. ‘The latest theory finds the secret of the 
growth of the cranial cavity in the pituitary gland. 
Thus Dr. W. K. Gregory says: “It is safe to assume 
that the action of glandular secretions in the humanoid 
stock, particularly the pituitary gland, was responsible 
for the rapid brain development and other structural 
changes, the erect posture, shorter teeth, speech, and 
other characteristics that distinguish man from the 
ape” (see “The Dawn Man,” an authorized interview 
with H. F. Osborn and W. K. Gregory in McClure’s 
Magazine, March, 1923). 

What discredits these hypotheses in the judgment 
of common sense is not that they conflict with one 
another or that they make large use of the imagination, 
but that they are all hopelessly inadequate to bridge 
the gulf between animal and man. The drying up of 
the forests would explain the death of the monkeys 


88 THE CHRISTIAN AND E,VOLUTION 


but not the birth of the human race, and at any rate 
“the arboreal theory of man’s origin has been given 
up” (Osborn, in Asia, p. 431); there is no possible 


_proof that putting monkeys or apes on a low diet or 


*, 


on a meat diet has now or ever did have a tendency 


‘to turn them into men; the gorilla has had a semi- 


erect posture for a million years or more, it is said, 
with his hands free to make any use of them he 
pleased, but it has never made a man of him; and as 


_-to the glandular theory the question is, whence came 


the glands which have had this marvelous effect? The 
removal of the thyroid gland from a sheep or of the 
pituitary gland from a dog will stunt the growth of 
these animals, but the presence or absence of these 
glands does not turn one species of animal into 
another. ‘Time in itself has no creative power and 
cannot turn fiction into fact. Indeed the naturalistic 
theories of the method by which the transition was ef- 
fected are more suggestive of the metamorphoses of 
Ovid than of the sober speculation of the scientist. 
Darwin was more cautious and said merely, in his 
“Descent of Man,” “The free use of the arms and 
hands, partly the cause and partly the result of man’s 
erect posture, appears to have led in an indirect man- 
ner to other modifications of structure.” And Geddes 
and Thomson say that “it is possible that man arose 
as a mutation, as an anthropoid genius in short, but 
the factors that led to his emergence are all unknown” 
(“Evolution,” 1911, p. 100). 

' The strict evolutionary view of man’s origin has in 
fact become more difficult to hold as anthopological 


TuE BonkEs AND THE STONES 89 


science has progressed. When evolution in its theory 
~of human descent was “a chain hanging by a missing 
\link, ” it could be said that the link might be found 
at any time. Now the number of links has been mul- 
tiplied indefinitely. Inferences drawn from the scanty 
skeletal and cultural remains—the bones and the 
stones—are extremely precarious, and of the few links 
in ascent of which traces are alleged to have been dis- 
covered, the opinion on fuller investigation is that 
Ahese (Pithecanthropus, Eoanthropus, etc.) are not on 
| the direct line of ancestry of modern man. The chain 
has been stretched out for one or two million years 
and all traces of it in the direct line, it is commonly 
admitted, are spurlos gesenkt. ‘This imaginary chain 
reaching back into the unknown and distant past is 
attached to an imaginary being, of whose existence 
the only proof is the requirements of the hypothesis 
to be proved. E,volutionists are no longer bold enough 
to construct genealogical trees leading from nomad to 
man. If the starting point of the development is un- 
known, the course of the development is unknown 
and the method of the development is unknown, the 
fact of the development may well be doubted. No 
known animal shows any tendency to evolve into 
man, and it is a wholly gratuitous assumption, apart 
from the exigencies of a theory, that any animal with 
such a tendency ever existed. If no such general 
tendency is assumed but man arose but once as a sport, 
or discontinuous mutation, or by a spiritual influx, 
or increment of being, or in theological language a 
special creation, then the naturalistic theory that man 


90 Tre CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


arose from the brute by a continuous, natural and 
knowable process is abandoned. If the line between 
man and animal was crossed only by a single pair, 
then we have a wholly unique event not covered by 
any known or general law of science. We are back 
in special creation—or chance which gives up the prob- 
lem.. It is necessary, when we think of it, that there 
should be a double miracle, for both the man and the 
woman must be evolved at the same time and at the 
same place, or there would be no continuation of the 
race. 

For the naturalistic philosopher, who like Heckel 
has a low view of man and no belief in a personal 
God, there can of course be no creation special or 
otherwise at any point of the series. For the theist, 
however, whether he be an evolutionist or not, it is 
“unphilosophical” to admit creation only at the lowest 
ranges of existence—in the case of the primitive atoms 
or the primordial living germs—but to deny it at the 
point which calls for the greatest exercise of creative 
power, the production of man with his godlike capac- 
ities and his immortal destiny. 


CHARTER iV IT 


EVOLUTIONARY DOUBTS 


“We declare that every wise thought and every useful discovery 
wherever it may come from, should be gladly and gratefully wel- 
comed.”—Pore Leo XIII. 


“God forbid that we should give out a dream of our imagination 
for a pattern of the world: rather may He graciously grant us 
to write an apocalypse or true vision of the footprints of the 
Creator imprinted on His creatures.”"—Francis Bacon. 


“We are utterly ignorant of the manner in which the idioplasm 
of the germ cell can so respond to the influence of the environ- 
ment as to call forth an adaptive variation.”"—EpMUND B. W1L,SoN. 


“What may for the moment detain us is the curiously nearly 
completely subjective character of the evidence for both the theory 
of descent and that of natural selection. Biology has been until 
now a science of observation; it is beginning to be one of obser- 
vation plus experiment. The evidence for its principal theories 
might be expected to be thoroughly objective in character, to be 
of the nature of positively observed, and, perhaps, experimentally 
proved fact. How is it actually? Speaking by and large, we only 
tell the general truth when we declare that no indubitable cases of 
species-forming or transforming, that is, of descent, have been 
observed; and that no recognized case of natural selection really 
selecting has been observed. I hasten to repeat the names of the 
Ancon sheep, the Paraguay cattle, the Porto Santo rabbit, the 
Artemias of Schmankewitch, and the de Vriesian evening prim- 
roses to show that I know my list of classic possible exceptions 
to this denial of observed species-forming; and to refer to Wel- 
don’s broad-and-narrow-fronted crabs as a case of what may be 
an observation of selection at work. But such a list, even if it 
could be extended to a score, or to a hundred, of cases, is fudi- 
crous as objective proof of that descent and selection under whose 
domination the formation of millions of species is supposed to 
have occurred,”—VERNON KELLOGG, 


VII 
EVOLUTIONARY DOUBTS 
A isa NYSON says that our little systems have 


their day and cease to be, and a Biblical writer 

indicates that the things that can be shaken 
will pass away. Is the theory of evolution one of the 
things that cannot be shaken, or one of those that will 
pass away? : 

There has been in recent years a terrible shaking 
of theories which have been regarded as eternal and 
immutable truth. The law of gravitation has been 
shaken by Ejinstein’s theory of relativity. The prin- 
ciple of the indestructibilty of matter has been called 
in question by the phenomena of radioactivity. Atoms 
described by Clerk-Maxwell in 1875 as “those foun- 
dation stones of the universe, unbroken and unworn,” 
are now imagined by Sir Oliver Lodge to have a nu- 
clear motion of the velocity of light. It would be a 
paradox of science if evolution, a theory of change, 
should be like the laws of the Medes and Persians 
which change not—if it alone should stand immovable 
amid the flux which it describes. 

Signs of the awakening of doubt in the scientific 
mind are by no means absent. One of the most sig- 
nificant of these is Bateson’s presidential address at 
Toronto (see Science, Jan. 20, 1922), which has 
_Proved to be something of a bombshell in its effect 
93 


94. Tuer CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTION 


alike on popular and scientific opinion. A few para- 
graphs will furnish a text for the discussion of this 
chapter. 

“When students of other sciences ask us 
what is now currently believed about the origin 
of species we have no clear answer to give. Faith 
has given place to agnosticism for reasons which 
on such an occasion as this we may profitably 
consider. ... We cannot see how the differentia- 
tion into species came about. Variation of many 
kinds, often considerable, we daily witness, but 

‘no origin of species” (p. 57). 
~ “In dim outline evolution is evident enough. 
From the facts it is a conclusion which inevitably 
follows. But that particular and essential bit of 
the theory of evolution which is concerned with 
the origin and nature of species remains utterly 
mysterious. We no longer feel as we used to do, 
that the process of variation, now contempora- 
neously occurring, is the beginning of a work 
which needs merely the element of time for its 
completion; for even time cannot complete that 
which has not yet begun. The conclusion in 
which we were brought up, that species are a 
product of a summation of variations, ignored 
the chief attribute of species first pointed out by 
John Ray that the product of their crosses is fre- 
quently sterile in greater or less degree. Huxley, 
very early in the debate, pointed out this grave 
defect in the evidence, but before breeding re- 
searches had been made on a large scale no one 


EVvoLuTIONARY Dousts 95 


felt the objection to be serious. Extended work 
might be trusted to supply the deficiency. It has 
not done so, and the significance of the negative 
evidence can no longer be denied” (p. 58). 

“The production of an indubitably sterile 
hybrid from completely fertile parents which 
have arisen under critical observation from a 
single common origin is the event for which we 
wait. Until this event is witnessed, our knowl- 
_ edge of evolution is incomplete in a vital respect. 
From time to time a record of such an observa- 
tion is published, but none has yet survived criti- 
cism. Meanwhile, though our faith in evolution 
stands unshaken, we have no acceptable account 
of the origin of ‘species.’ . . . Analysis has re- 
vealed hosts of transferable character. . . . Specific 
difference, therefore, must be regarded as prob- 
ably attaching to the base upon which these 
transferables are implanted of which we know 
absolutely nothing at all” (p. 59). 

“We see novel forms appearing, but they are 
no new species of Oenothera, nor are the parents 
which produce them pure or homozygous forms” 
(p. 60). 

“I have put before you very frankly the con- 
siderations which have made us agnostic as to 
the actual mode and processes of evolution. When 
such confessions are made the enemies of science 
see their chance. If we cannot declare here and 
now how species arose, they will obligingly offer 
us the solutions with which obscurantism is sat- 
7 


96 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


isfied. Let us then proclaim in precise and un- 
mistakable language that our faith in evolution is 
unshaken. Every available line of argument con- 
‘verges on this inevitable conclusion. ‘The obscur- 
antist has nothing to suggest which is worth a 
moment’s attention. The difficulties which weigh 
upon the professional biologist need not trouble 
the layman. Our doubts are not as to the reality 
or truth of evolution, but as to the origin of 
species, a technical, almost domestic, problem. 
Any day that mystery may be solved. The dis- 
coveries of the last twenty-five years enable us 
for the first time to discuss these questions in- 
telligently and on a basis of fact. That synthesis 
will follow on an analysis, we do not and cannot 
doubt” (p. 61). 


Several points in his address are peculiarly signifi- 
cant. (1) There are no intermediate species, or in- 
termediate forms between species as would be expected 
if the common theories of evolution are true (see p. 
56). (2) There have been no observed or demon- 
strated cases of a change from one species into 
another. In the light of this careful statement of an 
authority of the first rank, it appears that a professor 
of zoology, H. H. Lane, permits his zeal to outrun 
his discretion when he says that “it is no exaggeration 
to say that now we have seen literally hundreds of 
new species produced by experiment either in labora- 
tory or field... . This is evolution; there is involved 
no hypothesis or theory, in the ordinary acceptation 


EvoLutionARY Dousts 97 


aa 


of those terms” (“Evolution and Christian Faith,” 
1923, p.47). (3) The missing link in Darwin’s argu- 
ment for evolution, as Huxley saw in 1863, was the 
sterility of hybrids. The objection instead of being 
overcome by later research, as Huxley hoped, has now 
become in Bateson’s opinion even more serious. ‘The 
“stubborn mule” at least makes the knowledge of evo- 
lution “incomplete in a vital respect.’’ The horse has 
been eulogized as the cheval de bataille of evolution, 
and if so as the matter stands it is a case of the horse 
against the mule. 

(4) After more than sixty years of intensive re- 
search carried on by a host of the brightest minds in 
the field of science, the verdict of science, as voiced 
by an accepted leader, is that we are profoundly igno- 
rant of the cause of the rise of new species. It is not 
simply that evolutionists differ in their opinion but 
that every theory thus far proposed is in Bateson’s 
view untenable and unworkable. Numerous author- 
ities of the first rank can be quoted agreeing with 
Bateson’s agnosticism as to the causes of evolution. 
T. H. Morgan, a Mendelian, says as we have seen that 
“the causes of the variations that give rise to new 
characters we do not know” (“A Critique of the 
Theory of Evolution,” p. 194). In his remarkable ex- 
periments with the wild fruit fly, Drosophila ampelo- 
phila, he has produced 125 different types or races, 
but says that no one could doubt that they all belong 
to the same species (p. 13). 

V. L. Kellogg, in his “Darwinism Today,” 1907, 
Says that the “Great Cause” or “Great Desideratum” 


98 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTION 


is still to seek, and remarks: ‘With Osborn let us join 
the believers in the ‘unknown factors in evolution.’ 
Let us begin with Ignoramus, but never follow it with 
Ignorabimus” (pp. 377, 378). He adds: “We are 
ignorant; terribly, immensely ignorant” (p. 387). 
More recently in speaking of Lamarckism and Dar- 
winism he says that “the recent great advance in the 
knowledge of the mechanism and manner of heredity 
has materially weakened the validity of each of these 
classic causal explanations of evolution” (“Recent 
Biology and Its Significance,’ North American Re- 
view, June, 1923, p. 753). But Mendelism itself, he 
admits, has very obvious limitations as an explanation 
of adaptation or of species-forming. ‘The problem of 
the causes of evolution is “no less large and no less 
unsolved than in older days” (p. 754). 

It is now quite commonly believed that new species 
arose from “mutations” and not from the minute va- 
riations or fluctuations of Darwin; but it is admitted 
with R. C. Punnett that “beyond the fact that it is a 
process initiated in the germ cells, almost nothing is 
known at present of the conditions under which a 
mutation arises. Until such knowledge is forthcom- 
ing, that most important link in any theory of evolu- 
tion—the problem of the nature of species—must 
remain unsolved” (Art. “Evolution” in Hastings’ 
“Encycl. of Religion and Ethics,” vol. v., p. 623). 
The choice now lies, it is evident, between the theory 
of natural selection and complete agnosticism as to the 
process by which species originated. 

(5) Bateson’s creed is summed up in two rather 


EvoLutTioNARY Doupts 99 


paradoxical articles: Complete agnosticism as to the 
effective factors of evolution, but practical certainty, 
described however as faith rather than knowledge, as 
to the fact of evolution. After sixty years of dis- 
couragement in the search for the unknown factor in 
evolution, after every sort of cause—we might almost 
say every conceivable cause, whether external or in- 
ternal or both—has been tried and found wanting, we 
admire the optimism that can say, “Any day that 
mystery may be solved.” If a business corporation 
should put out a prospectus in the tone of Bateson’s 
exposition, the public would expect an application for 
a receiver rather than a declaration of dividends. To 
admit frankly that no case of descent has ever been 
observed, that the Darwinian method of descent is dis- 
credited, and that no alternative hitherto proposed will 
work, and that the standing argument against the 
theory of descent—the sterility of hybrids—has never 
been removed, all this is to repeat with high scientific 
authority what the much-despised “obscurantist” has 
been saying and, as Bateson realizes, cannot but con- 
firm the anti-evolutionist in his convictions. 

The embarrassing if not precarious position in 
which the transformist is now placed is illustrated by 
Professor Osborn. It was he, it will be remembered, 
who was the original sponsor for the “unknown fac- 
tors” in evolution. It was Osborn who said in “Fifty 
Years of Darwinism” (1909) that in one aspect 
paleontology “gives to Darwinism a most emphatic 
negative” (p. 223); and who said in his “Origin and 
Evolution of Life’ (1917) that “the causes of the 


100 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


evolution of life are as mysterious as the law of evo- 
lution is certain” (p. 9). Shocked by the Bateson 
“bombshell” and its reverberations, Osborn has now 
in part at least reversed himself in his attitude toward 
Darwinism. He now declares in his “Evolution and 
Religion” (1923) that “Bateson is living the life of a 
scientific specialist, out of the main current of bio- 
logical discovery, and that his opinion that we have 
failed to discover the origin of species is valueless and 
directly contrary to the truth’ (pp. 3, 4); and fur- 
ther he asserts: “I would like to state positively that 
in my opinion Natural Selection is the only cause of 
evolution which has thus far been discovered and dem- 
onstrated” (p. 4). In the present state of opinion it 
would seem doubtful strategy to tie up the fortunes 
of evolution with those of natural selection. 

The victory of evolution over the popular mind was 
due to Darwin’s skillful defense of natural selection 
as a vera causa (given variation and heredity). When, 
however, natural selection is discarded, together with 
all alternative theories, evolution becomes a plausible 
hypothesis suggested by certain facts in nature, but 
without proof in fact that it ever did take place as a 
natural process, in view of the objections against 
every method suggested. 

We are back indeed in the pre-Darwinian position 
of Robert Chambers in his ‘“‘Vestiges of the Natural 
History of Creation” (1st ed., 1844), whose argu- 
ments in favor of descent Darwin repeated and ampli- 
fied. These arguments as summarized by Darwin are 
geographical distribution, geological succession, homo- 


EvoLutTIONARY Dousts 101 


logical structure, embryological development and rudi- 
mentary organs, but all of them are mentioned in 
Chambers’ earlier work. 

It cannot be said that these arguments in general 
have been materially strengthened since the time of 
Darwin or even of Chambers. Of the argument from 
embryology, for example, T. H. Morgan says that the 
newer views of germinal variation (Weismann) and 
of discontinuous variation (De Vries) have played 
havoc with the biogenetic law (p. 19); and Adam 
Sedgwick asserts that the explanation of embryonic 
structures referred to is purely a deduction from the 
evolution theory (Art. “Embryology,” Encycl. Brit., 
pi d22). | 

The plainest and most popular argument for evolu- 
tion is that from comparative anatomy. When we see 
the similarity in structure between the hand and arm 
of the man and the ape, and the forefoot of rat, horse, 
and elephant, and less strikingly of the wing of the 
bird and the pectoral fin of the fish, it is natural to 
account for the similarity by the theory of common 
descent. A family resemblance points to family re- 
lationship and ultimately to a common ancestry. But 
there is another explanation, and an equally obvious 
explanation of this resemblance in structure. It is 
that of creation according to a common plan. We 
should expect all living creatures, who are to live in 
the same world and a world governed by the same 
mechanical principles and the same chemical laws to 
have numerous resemblances in anatomical structure 
and physiclogical processes. In practice a series of 


102 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


forms arranged with reference to one or more char- 
acters may not correspond to the chronological series. 
Thus T. H. Morgan has shown that a number of 
series can be arranged among the mutants of the 
Drosophila fly, based on length of wings, color of eyes, 
etc., but that these serial arrangements would give an 
entirely false idea of the way in which the different 
types arose, or of the order in which they appeared 
(‘Critique of the Evolution Theory,” pp. 10-13). He 
thinks that the evidence which is based on a continuous 
series of the variants of any organ has little value. - 

The paleontological argument is today one of the 
main battle grounds of evolution. Current theories in 
geology and in biology are inextricably bound up to- 
gether and modifications in either science will cause 
changes in the other. It was Lyell’s theory of the 
succession of fossil forms in the rocks that ‘smoothed 
the way’ for Darwin and Huxley, and it is admitted 
that a decisive element in the classification of the 
strata and the determination of their age is the char- 
acter of the fossils they contain. Thus Le Conte says: 
“There are, then, two tests of a formation and a cor- 
responding geological period, viz., 1. Conformity of 
the strata or rock-system, and, 2. General similarity 
of the fossils, or life-system, . . . Of these two tests, 
however, the life-system is usually considered the most 
important, and in case of disagreement must control 
classification” (“Elements of Geology,” 5th ed., rev., . 
1907, pp. 203, 204). Again under the head of com- 
parison of fossils, he says: ‘“This is by far the best, 
and, in widely separated localities the only, method of 


EvoLutionary Doupts 103 


determining the age of rocks” (p. 206). Sir A. 
Geikie likewise says that “it is mainly by the remains 
of plants and animals imbedded in the rocks that the 
geologist is guided in unravelling the chronological 
succession of geological changes” (Art. “Geology,” in 
Encyl. Brit., 11th ed., p. 638). 

Price in “The New Geology,” 1923, protests against 
the biological onion-coat theory that successive strata 
of rocks each containing a different kind of fossils 
were universal around the world. Discussing the 
problems of “deceptive conformity” where for ex- 
ample the Cretaceous may rest upon the Devonian, the 
whole of the intervening strata being wanting, and of 
“thrust-faults’ in which an “older” formation rests 
upon a “younger,” he draws the perhaps too sweeping 
conclusion that “any kind of fossiliferous rock, ‘young’ 
or ‘old,’ may be found conformably on any other kind 
of fossiliferous rock, ‘older’ or ‘younger’” (p. 296). 
He instances vast regions in Glacier National Park, in 
New York, in the southern Appalachians, in Utah and 
Idaho, in the Highlands of Scotland, in the Lepontine 
Alps, in Scandinavia and in Northern China in which 
“older” rock rests, sometimes conformably, upon 
“younger” rock; and he finds incredible the theories 
of folding or of lateral thrusts to account for all these 
phenomena. With more extensive study of the earth’s 
crust the problem becomes more acute. Professor 
Price thinks that these cases of “thrust faults’ consti- 
tute the crux of modern discussion of geological 
theories, and indeed the crux of the discussion about 
organic evolution. He complains that his book has 


104. Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLUTION 


been treated by a “conspiracy of silence,” and a care- 
ful review of his arguments by a competent evolu- 
tionary geologist would seem to be in order. 

The strongest evidence for evolution, Professor 
More maintains in his “Dogma of Evolution,” is to be 
found in the existence of fossil remains, but palz- 
ontology cannot be translated into chronology, and 
the study of the records emphasizes the breaks rather 
than the continuity of development. For example, 
“when the Silurian vertebrates appeared they did so 
without any transitional form having been preserved”’ 
(p. 154). Of the birds it is said that “the appearance 
of feathers as an apparatus for flying is as nearly im- 
possible a fact to explain by evolution as can be 
imagined. By no known theory can a feather be ac- 
counted for. .. . Evolutionists have wisely and per- 
sistently avoided the solution of this problem’ (pp. 
156, 157). The sudden and abrupt appearance of 
the higher plants (angiosperms) is an analogous case 
in the vegetable world. ‘“The more one studies pale- 
ontology, the more certain one becomes that evolution 
is based on faith alone. ... The evidence from pale- 
ontology is for discontinuity; only by faith and 
imagination is there continuity of variation” (pp. 160, 
161). 

The chapters of the geological evidence have empha- 
sized another fact that is apt to be slighted by the 
evolutionist, that of the fixity of organic forms. ‘The 
microscope has revealed in regard to the world of 
Protozoa and unicellular forms “that this once invis- 
ible world is much the largest division of all the living 


EvoLurionARyY Dousts 105 


kingdom, exceeding in actual bulk all visible plants 
and animals put together.” Whole strata of rocks 
are made up chiefly of the skeletons of diatoms (uni- 
cellular alge); and of the Foraminifera it can be 
said that “a great part of the crust of the globe has 
been constructed by them in the form of massive strata 
of limestone, chalk cliffs and deposits, great in thick- 
ness and extent” (W. H. Thompson, “What is Phys- 
ical Life?’ 1909, pp. 70, 80, and 81). Yet according 
to current reckoning these forms still living today have 
remained practically unchanged since the known dawn 
of life. They have been subjected to the action of 
selection, variation, struggle for existence, change of 
climate and environment and the passage of time and 
are practically the same now as at the dawn of life. 
If, for a period computed at forty million years, like 
has been producing like in the larger part of the or- 
ganic world, the unavoidable inference is that fixity 
of species is a basal law of nature. So long as we 
have to reckon with what Darwin called “the undis- 
covered and undiscoverable essence of species,” it 
would be dogmatic to assert that one species has never 
been changed into another by natural causes; but the 
burden of proof rests heavily on the transformist to 
show where exceptions to the law of the fixity of 
species have actually occurred. 

It is now sixty-five years since Darwin wrote, and 
leading evolutionists are confessing that they walk by 
faith, and that their faith is based on things hoped 
for and unseen rather than upon observed facts. At 
critical points the argument for evolution has not been 


106 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


strengthened but rather weakened in the course of 
time. No certainly established transformation of 
species has come within the range of observation and 
experiment. Huxley’s two difficulties, the infertility 
of hybrids and the persistence of types, have been 
emphasized, one by experimental breeding and the 
other by fossil discoveries. Palzeontology has not re- 
vealed the transition forms which by hypothesis must 
once have existed. Proposed methods of transforma- 
tion have proved to be of only limited application. 
Selective breeding shows that Darwinian variation is 
within rather narrow limits; Lamarckian use and dis- 
use will not apply to the vegetable world and the in- 
heritability of characters so acquired is in question; 
Mendelian inheritance must assume differences in the 
parent stocks before it can account for them in the off- 
spring, and its range of variation is limited; the dis- 
continuous variations of DeVries are not proved to 
be significant enough to leap the barrier of species, 
and if they are large enough they become almost in- 
distinguishable from special creation; orthogenesis, 
or an inherent tendency to vary in a given direction, 
creative synthesis and creative evolution are all semi- 
mystical conceptions which pay toll to the creationist 
or introduce the ideas of creation surreptitiously. No 
theory has shown, perhaps because no theory can 
show, how within the arcana of the germ cells the 
straight line of heredity is deflected into that of spe- 
cific difference; the unknown factor in evolution re- 
mains so long undiscovered because with great prob- 
ability it is undiscoverable by the methods of science. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE METAPHYSICAL REVIEW 


“Fvolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipa- 
tion of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, 
incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and 
during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel trans- 
formation.”—HERBERT SPENCER, 


“Wallace apparently thought of the material universe being 
underpinned throughout by a spiritual universe, and we have no 
right to object to that, but what the scientific mind recoils from 
is the suggestion that a spiritual influx occasionally operates 
dramatically, helping the organism over difficult stiles.’—J. ArTHUR 
THOMSON. 


“T agree that the view of Nature which I have maintained in 
these lectures is not a simple one. Nature appears as a complex 
system whose factors are dimly discerned by us. But, I ask you, 
is not this the very truth? Should we not distrust the jaunty 
assurance with which every age prides itself that it at last has 
hit upon the ultimate concepts in which all that happens can be 
formulated? ‘The aim of science is to seek the simplest explana- 
tions of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of 
thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal 
of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural 
philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.””—A. N. 
WHITEHEAD, 


Vill 
THE METAPHYSICAL REVIEW 


r NHE remark has been made that “it is in the 
field of metaphysics rather than that of biology 
that the riddle of evolution will have to find its 

final solution.” ‘The exposition of evolution is sure 
to bring up such problems as those of cause, of the 
ultimate nature of reality, of the connection between 
mind and body, of the essential nature of man, and 
of the relation of God to the world. To deal with 
these problems would take a treatise on metaphysics, 
but a few points brought up by the current discussion 
may profitably be noticed. 

It is often said that evolution has nothing to do 
with cause, that is at least with efficient cause. ‘‘E,vo- 
lution is the illustration of a method, not the exposi- 
tion of a cause.” But when something new appears 
the demand for a cause, given the constitution of 
human reason, is insistent, and the evolutionist is in 
danger of assuming a dog-in-the-manger attitude if 
he will assign no cause himself and refuses to let 
anyone else point it out. Again it is said that evolu- 
tion deals only with proximate or second, not with 
ultimate or first, causes. ‘This assumes, from a the- 
istic standpoint, that the appearance of the new in the 
world’s history belongs in the sphere of Providence 
and not in that of Creation. But this is the whole 

109 


110 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


question at issue: whether the appearance of the new 
—of life, or of consciousness, or of man, or of the 
new species—can be accounted for by second causes, 
and should not rather be construed under the category 
of creation, mediate or immediate. 

When the theistic evolutionist says that Science or 
Evolution does not deal with the problems of ultimate 
origins or of a First Cause, he is entirely correct, as 
the field of science is self-restricted. When, however, 
this statement is coupled with the assumption that 
everything in the world since the beginning has come 
about by “natural knowable” causes without “mirac- 
ulous interferences and special creations,” he is prac- 
tically abandoning his former position and is dealing 
emphatically with the problem of a First Cause. He 
is dealing with it by denying that such a Cause has 
operated at all in any direct and effective way in 
causal or creative action since the beginning. It may 
be that there has been no leaven put into the meal 
since the beginning and no thread added to the web, 
and that there has been no new graft upon the tree of 
life since the springing of the first seed, and that the 
origin of life and all varieties of life and the origin 
of the human race and of every individual were due 
entirely to natural and knowable processes, but it is 
difficult to reconcile such a position with belief in a 
personal Creator. We cannot believe in a personal 
«Creator whose creative activity was exhausted as soon 
as it was exercised. 

The creationist will find aid and comfort in the fact 
that many evolutionary theories approach so near to 


Tue Metarnyysica, REVIEW tik 


that of special creation that the difference is merely 
verbal. Even theories of the origin of species have 
difficulty in keeping aloof from the discredited special 
creation. If it be conceded with Darwin that most spe- 
cies are rigid and but few change (“Origin of Species,” 
li, p. 272), and that in the latter only a few individuals 
show a specific variation, then we are leaving the 
ground of general law, and are dangerously near to 
that of special creation or at least of special guidance. 
This is equally true of other theories whether they 
emphasize the internal or the environmental factor. 
FE. B. Poulton, of Oxford, says of Nageli’s theory: 
-“The idea of evolution under the compulsion of an 
internal force residing in the individual is in essence 
little removed from special creation” (“Fifty Years 
of Darwinism,’ 1909, p. 25). ‘The same may be said 
of Bergson’s mystical current of life, passing from 
generation to generation and dividing itself among 
species. Weismann’s theory that one identical ger- 
minal substance can produce the most divergent forms 
of life, in the opinion of Max Nordau, “hardly differs 
from that of a new divine act of creation as the origin 
of every single life’ (see Hibbert Journal, July, 1912, 
p- 750). J. A. Thomson feels that there is not much 
to choose “between a theory of Man’s origin by a 
hypothetical mutation, which one could not understand 
even if one knew that it occurred, and a theory of 
Man’s origin by special creation in which one does not 
believe” (“Bible of Nature,” p. 193). Darwin like- 
wise thought that the sudden development of new and 
widely different forms in an inexplicable manner has 
8 


112 THe CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutION 


little advantage over the old belief in the creation of 
species from the dust of the earth. Bergson main- 
tains that the production of the eye by minute varia- 
tions on independent lines of development in mollusk 
and vertebrate must be a “miracle” and the work of 
“a good genius” (“Creative Evolution,” pp. 65, 68). 
And J. A. Thomson again completes the circle when 
he says of Bateson’s Mendelism that “it makes the 
origin and nature of the primordial organisms too ut- 
terly miraculous if we suppose them to have had such 
a rich stock of initiatives and implications” (“System 
of Animate Nature,” vol. ii, p. 364). 

We see that each of the typical theories in the view 
of its critics is no better than that of special creation. 
Little relief can be found in the use of the expressions 
“Epigenesis” or “Creative Synthesis,’ or even in the 
now popular “Emergent Evolution,” for if the prefix 
“epi” or the term “creative” is given its full meaning, 
that is, if they mean genuine novelty, they call aloud 
for some adequate cause to account for the appearance 
of the new. If these criticisms made by competent 
evolutionists are correct, then we have to choose be- 
tween the alternatives of special creation or of some 
theory differing only verbally from it. Special crea- 
tion is a sort of mathematical limit to which evolution- 
ists of all schools approach infinitely near but never 
reach. 

From the standpoint of causation there is no satis- 
factory answer to the questions: How can the old 
produce the new? How can like beget like, as it 
demonstrably has done through countless ages, and 


Tue Merapryysica, REVIEW 113 


yet beget the different? The alternatives, in what ap- 
pears to be the most advanced evolutionary circles, 
are complete agnosticism as to the process by which 
the new or the different is brought into being (coupled 
with the hope that the knowledge will some day be 
forthcoming) and a supernatural factor creative or 
directive. The Newton of biology is still needed to 
solve the problem: Who (or what) made thee to 
differ? and the problem is more serious when evolu- 
tion is exalted into a comprehensive system of phi- 
losophy. 

When the evolutionist is emphasizing continuity he 
insists that there are no gaps in nature, no intrusions, 
no supernatural hiatus, no spiritual influx; everything 
is the result of resident forces; “each stage in the 
process with all that it contains must find its explana- 
tion within the universe and not in something out- 
side” (W. R. Sorley). When, however, the evo- 
lutionist is emphasizing progress and the outcrop of 
genuine novelties, then he speaks of epigenesis and of 
creative synthesis. But creative synthesis, the theist 
will insist in default of an explanation of why it is 
creative, is, being interpreted, simply another expres- 
sion for special creation. To waver between the view 
that every phase of existence is a natural result of the 
past phase and the view that there are new beginnings, 
big lifts, and real increments of being, is to make evo- 
lution mean little or nothing. 

When evolution is defined in terms of continuity 
alone, we hear of preformation and of the present 
being the child of the past; but when it is defined, as 


114 THe CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTIoNn 


it is just as frequently, in terms of progress, then we 
hear of epigenesis and creative synthesis. It is per- 
fectly clear that evolution will not work without the 
use of both of these conceptions of continuity and 
progress, and it is equally clear that the only way in 
which these conceptions can be combined is in the 
framework of a theistic view of the world. Evolu- 
tion, in fact, will not work without theism, for the 
operation of a supernatural factor alone provides the 
possibility of progress. The evolutionist may contend 
that given time enough the complexities of life and 
mind will evolve. But time has no causative or crea- 
tive power. He may again begin at the other end, 
with the “highly evolved,” and argue that the steps 
in the descent are so minute as to be negligible, and 
thus seek to liquidate his debt to causation by infini- 
tesimal repudiations. But after all there must be a 
cause of the essentially new; something does not come 
out of nothing either gradually or suddenly. 


No one has pointed out the hopeless impasse of 
naturalistic evolution and the fallacy of its regress 
from the higher to the lower better than the poet, 
Alfred Noyes, has done in verse and in prose. He 
argues the point well in his poem on “The Origin of 
Life” : 

In the beginning ?—slowly grope we back 
Along the narrowing track, 

Back to the deserts of the world’s pale prime, 
The mire, the clay, the slime; 


And then—what then? Surely to something less; 
Back, back, to Nothingness! 


Tue Merapyysica, REvIEw 115 


This is not merely the old infinite regress of causes 
which thinkers have always sought to avoid,—Ex 
infinito ne causam causa sequatur (Lucr. ii, 255)— 
but it is a regress to causes less adequate at each step 
to produce the final result. The evolutionary regress 
—always to something less—demands more insistently 
the theistic postulate than did the old endless regress 
of finite causes. As Alfred Noyes says again, this 
time in prose: “We explain man by something less, 
and that again by something less, until we have whit- 
tled away all things visible and invisible. We have 
deliberately taught ourselves to look downward into 
nothingness, though true science and true reason and 
every natural instinct of religion would teach us to 
look upward to the ever-expanding heavens and the 
infinite power of God” (‘Civilization Imperiled,” 
Saturday Evening Post, April 12, 1919, p. 22). No 
discoveries in science can do away with the law of 
causation, which is the foundation of all science. 

No one appreciates more fully or has stated more 
frankly these logical difficulties of evolution than has 
J. Arthur Thomson in his “System of Animate Na- 
ture,” 1920. Professor Thomson stands high as a com- 
prehensive thinker, a careful scientist, a graceful and 
popular writer and a reverent student of nature. He 
is not ignorant of the pitfalls of evolutionary logic, 
or of the devices used to escape from them. No anti- 
evolutionist has found more unerringly the weak spots 
of the evolutionary armor. Evolution is vague in 
meaning. “The study of organic evolution has been 
hampered by a plethora of words and a dearth of 


116 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTION 


facts” (ii, p. 353). The term evolution is loosely used 
and its use “begs several questions” (ii, p. 355) when 
it covers the dissimilar fields of (1) the Domain of the 
Inorganic, (2) the Realm of Organisms, and (3) the 
Kingdom of Man. The fallacy of the generatio equi- 
voca should be guarded against. “How watchful we 
have to be lest we get entangled in the vicious circle 
of inventing a past from its continued life in the 
present, and then interpreting the present in terms of 
the past” (1, p. 16). The word evolution is not a 
sacred or magic charm. ‘Some people talk as if they 
had only to mutter the word ‘Evolution’ for difficulties 
to disappear” (ii, p..370). Evolution will not work 
logical miracles. “In no case can we think of con- 
sciousness arising out of motion” (1, p. 252). “No 
one can conjure ‘mind’ out of ‘matter,’ even if he in- 
voke ‘Evolution’ many times” (ii, p. 385). “We can- 
not derive mind from anything else of a different 
kind” (ii, p. 507). 

If, in spite of these warnings, we find so clear a 
thinker, so gifted a rhetorician and so persuasive an 
advocate as Professor Thomson falling into these very 
pitfalls which he himself has pointed out, it must be 
because of the weakness of the cause which he is de- 
fending. Two paragraphs are so important that they 
may be transcribed: “It is certain, from centuries of 
failures, that by no jugglery of words can we account 
for thinking in terms of matter and motion. ‘There- 
fore the alternatives (1) to regard the scientific belief 
in evolution as in part at least an illusion, since what 
comes later, e. g., thinking, is distinct in kind from 


Tue MetapuHysicar REVIEW 117 


what comes earlier; or (2) to suppose that the low- 
est animals are potentially psychical; with, as Sir 
Francis Darwin puts it... ‘faint copy of all we know 
as consciousness in ourselves.’ The first position is 
not easy, for the evolutionary explanation is prac- 
tically proved along anatomical and physiological 
lines; the second position is not easy, for the ‘faint 
copy’ becomes faint indeed when we pass to the 
simplest organisms” (ii, p. 374). Professor Thom- 
son here falls into the pitfall of the vicious circle: 
consciousness is postulated where there is no evidence 
for it to account for consciousness later in the series. 
But the author again wilfully disregards his own 
warnings when he says: “Without losing sight of real 
differences we may believe in a continuity of evolu- 
tionary process from inorganic genesis to human his- 
tory, but it must be confessed that there is a good 
deal of scientific faith implied” (ii, p. 377). And 
again he hints that living creatures were born “‘of the 
dust of the earth and the dew of heaven, with the sun 
shining on both” (1i, p. 385)—without indicating 
how often this happened; and he says even more 
plainly that “it seems very likely that organisms arose 
upon this earth from non-living materials, in a man- 
ner at present obscure”’ (i, p. 252). Professor Thom- 
son—in order to avoid the dreaded “spiritual influx” — 
is led, gracefully but inevitably, into the pitfalls 
against which he had warned his fellow evolutionists. 
He must assume continuity of process in the three 
realms which he had so carefully distinguished. He 
must use the word evolution in its popular generality 


118 Tue CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTION 


and vagueness. He must assume “mind” in the in- 
organic sphere where there is no evidence even of life 
and every reason to believe that conditions of the 
planet made life impossible. He must even, it 
appears, stake the fortunes of evolution upon the 
questionable metaphysics of the “identity” or double- 
aspect theory, endowing even lifeless matter with the 
attributes of consciousness. “The desire for conti- 
nuity impels us to the speculation that even the inor- 
ganic raw materials were psycho-physical’” (i, p. 252). 

Thomson, as we have seen, can save the doctrine 
of continuity and can prevent evolution in a broad 
sense from becoming an illusion only by invoking the 
aid of a lame logic, the vicious circle, and a dubious 
metaphysic, the identity or double-aspect hypothesis. 
By this strategy the flank of evolution’s position is 
left dangerously exposed. In order to bridge the 
chasms, matter, contrary to common sense and scien- 
tific evidence, is endowed with life and consciousness; 
while man, contrary to religious faith, loses his soul 
as an enduring or independent entity. With char- 
acteristic and commendable frankness Thomson con- 
fesses that animism (the theory of the interaction of 
soul and body), while not favored by many scientists, 
“may be true for all that” (i, p. 240), and that if 
Bergson is right when he holds that “the mind over- 
flows the brain on all sides, and cerebral activity re- 
sponds only to a very small part of mental activity,” 
that “then personality is not permanently tethered to 
protoplasm” (1, p. 242). If there is a future life then 
the soul can exist apart from the body and the identity 


Tue Metapnysica, REvIEW 119 


theory must be given up. In his later work Thomson 
says, alluding to Wallace’s theory of a spiritual influx 
at the creation of man, “The idea of a divine inbreath- 
ing which made a mammal man, or an animate body, 
in St. Paul’s phrase, a spiritual body, seems to us to 
be counter to the idea of continuity in evolution, as 
if there were two worlds and not only one. But we do 
not urge this either, since the upholders of the crea- 
tionist view frankly prefer their transcendental con- 
tinuity to our empirical one” (“What is Man?” 1924, 
p33)). 

The evolutionist is in desperate straits when he 
chooses the sphere of metaphysics rather than that of 
science as his battlefield, and when he joins his for- 
tunes with those of a theory as vague and as vulner- 
able as the double-aspect theory. If common sense 
is right in believing that “dead matter” is without life 
and consciousness, or in believing that mind acts on 
body; if the religions of all time are right in believing 
that there is something for the dead and something 
better for the good than for the evil; if a religious 
thinker, Bishop Gore, is right when he contends that 
moral will is directive of physical force; if such sci- 
entific philosophers as Bergson in his ‘““Mind-Energy”’ 
(E. T., 1920), W. McDougald in his “Body and 
Mind” (1911), and J. B. Pratt in his “Matter and 
Spirit” (1922) are right in their elaborate and powér- 
ful defense of interactionism—in any of these cases 
the theory of evolution must be given up as being “in 
part’ (that is, in the philosophical part and at its 
crucial points) an illusion. 


120 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTIoNn 


It may be conceded that Professor Thomson is not 
happy in his excursion into metaphysics, but surely 
he is on firm ground so long as he remains in the field 
of biology. Let us ask then, what is his theory of the 
origin of species. He says that the heart of the matter 
is “that living creatures with a will to live, with an 
insurgent self-assertiveness, with a spirit of adven- 
ture, with an endeavor after well-being . . . do trade 
with time and have commerce with circumstances, as 
genuine agents, sharing in their own evolution’”’ (ii, p. 
456). We seem to be back in Lamarckism, but Thom- 
son, it is to be noted, does not believe in the in- 
heritance of acquired characters (see 11, pp. 482, 483). 
All the self-assertiveness and endeavor after well- 
being in the world on the part of the organism will 
not be handed down to the offspring and so cannot 
be a factor after all in the rise of new species. Thom- 
son is thus compelled, curiously enough, to transfer 
all this striving and self-assertion to the germ cells 
in order to make it effective in causing specific modi- 
fication. “They too [the germ cells] make essays in 
self-expression” (ii, p. 431). “They make essays in 
self-expression which we call variations” (ii, p. 435). 
It was said earlier that evolution means that all the 
present fauna and flora arose “in a natural knowable 
way’ (ii, p. 361) from somewhat simpler forms; but 
how can the self-expression of a germ cell be a know- 
able process? The transfer of Lamarckism to what 
goes on within the arcana of the germ cell is a novel 
hypothesis, but it is impossible to see how it has any 
scientific advantage over that of special creation. 


Tue Merrapyysica, REvIEw 121 


Professor Thomson’s elaborate and informing ex- 
position of evolution may prove to be as significant 
in the present controversy as was Bateson’s presiden- 
tial address of the next year. Mill has said that by 
means of hypotheses we arrive at truths which are not 
hypothetical, but a scientific hypothesis is one that is 
capable of verification by objective facts. The hy- 
pothesis of descent with modification, or transformism, 
still remains, sixty-five years after Darwin wrote, in 
the hypothetical category. The case for the natural 
origin of species is not strengthened when evolution 
is erected into a pretentious philosophical dogma, but- 
tressed on one side by a faulty logic and on the other 
by a dubious metaphysic. A theory in science, as was 
said by Sir J. J. Thomson in his recent lectures in 
this country, is “a tool, not a dogma.” When the tool 
is exalted into a dogma it is no longer a very useful 
tool. 


gt oe , 
neh he 





CHAPTER IX 


EVOLUTION AND THE FALL 


“As a matter of fact the higher man of today is not worrying 
about his sins at all, still less about their punishment.”—Sm 
Oxiver Lopce. 


“The evolutionist sees in the story of the Fall merely a sym- 
bolical description of the gradual passing of primitive mankind 
from an original state of ignorance to the attainment of moral 
consciousness.”—REGINALD S$. Moxon. 


“To the evolutionist sin is not an innovation, but is the sur- 
vival or misuse of habits and tendencies that were incidental to 
an earlier stage of development and whose sinfulness lies in their 
anachronism.”’—Canon J. M. WILSON. 


“No view of the human state is so inexpressibly sad as that 
which leaves out the Fall. The existence of evil in its many 
forms, as self-will and suffering and vice and crime, cannot be 
gainsaid, and, if this evil belongs to the essence of man as created, 
then there can be no prospect of relief here or hereafter. Sin 
will propagate sin in inevitable succession, as the greatest of 
ancient poets sang. Misery will be as the shadow which man casts 
when the sun is brightest. There can be nothing in him to drive 
out that which is part of his true self. The stream as it flows 
will always fall below its source. And this awful and inexorable 
rule knows in nature no reversal or repeal. Endless retribution 
is the plain teaching of the invariable sequence which we call 
natural law. Effectual forgiveness is the revelation of the Gospel.” 
—BisHorp WEsTcort, 


IX 
EVOLUTION AND THE FALL 
‘ VICTOR HUGO has said that the popularity of 


pantheism is due to the fact that man is unwill- 

ing to admit that there is any other being in the 
universe higher than himself. Modernism, so-called, 
is another illustration of this tendency in human 
nature. ‘To the modernist of an extreme type there 
is no revelation except the record of religious experi- 
ences; no authority higher than that whose source 
and seat is in the religious consciousness. There is 
no personal creative power greater than that of man— 


A man stood up in Panama, 
And the mountains stood aside. 


There is no inspiration higher than that of poet and 
artist. There is no Incarnation except that found in all 
the sons of men; no divinity except the manifestation 
of the divine in all men. There is no atoning sac- 
rifice except as illustrating the general law of progress 
through suffering. There is no Holy Spirit except 
the spirit of Jesus in the lives of His followers. There 
_is no salvation except through character; no regenera- 
tion except the realization by an individual of his 
highest capacities. Our very conception of God must 
be profoundly modified. God must be democratized. 
He is not a Creator and Sovereign, but is a member 
125 3 


126 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVvoLUutTION 


of a community of which we also are members. 
Heaven—as well as this world—must be “made safe 
for democracy.” A Soviet publication called the 
Bezbozhnik, or “Godless,” says: “We have finished 
with the earthly Czars; now we shall deal with the 
heavenly Czars.” In more polite phrase, “Monotheism 
must pass, and some form of view consistent with a 
cosmic evolutional democracy must take its place.”’ 

Whether such pride is praised or deprecated, it must 
be admitted that the pride of man makes him reluctant 
to accept the superior, the unique, the transcendent, 
or in short the supernatural. He prefers to think that 
God is altogether such a one as himself, or at least 
different only in degree. The pride of man is humbled 
not only by the acknowledgment of the infinite at- 
tributes of God and of the transcendence of God in 
His holiness and the majesty of His power, but by the 
confession that man himself is not what he ought to 
be, that he is a sinful and fallen creature. However 
great may be the achievements of the human intellect 
or however complete may be its mastery over the 
forces of nature, the presence and blight of sin in 
human life makes unrestrained self-congratulation im- 
possible. It is here that the evolution theory—the 
great achievement of man’s intellect of which he is 
justly proud—comes to the rescue of man’s self- 
esteem. Man, it tells him, is not fallen but rising, and 
the Fall and the Biblical story which enshrines it are 
frankly mythical. 

In proportion as the evolutionist delights in the 
apotheosis of man he minimizes God and deprecates 


EvoLUTION AND THE Fay 127 


any special interposition of God or display of His 
power in the world’s history. Instead of saying, Have 
not Thy hands made all this? How wonderful are 
Thy works! the evolutionist can say, Has not my 
mind conceived this grand and all-comprehending 
system of cosmic evolution? Has not my intellect 
grasped at last the meaning of the universe and dis- 
covered the universal law which covers all the proc- 
esses of existence from the primitive electrons to the 
grand dénouement of human history? As Themis- 
tocles among the Greeks erected a temple to All-Coun- 
seling Artemis and there worshiped at the shrine of 
his own genius, so the modern intellect in its devotion 
to the formula of evolution is practically worshiping 
itself. 

To the modern mind, shaped upon the philosophy 
of naturalistic evolution, the supernatural elements of 
the Christian history and the evangelical doctrines of 
sin and redemption are equally unacceptable. It is 
plain that these doctrinal and historical elements of 
Christianity will stand or fall together, and the his- 
tory and the doctrine afford each other mutual sup- 
port. Apart from the supernatural there is no power 
that can save from sin, and if there is no transcend- 
ence of God in any sense, there is no holiness of God 
against the background of which sin will appear ex- 
ceeding sinful. The supernatural in the New Testa- 
ment is inseparably connected with the fact of sin and 
the purpose of redemption. The Son of man came to 
seek and to save that which was lost; the Son of man 
came to minister and to give His life a ransom for 

9 


128 Tue CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuvtIoN 


many. ‘The historical facts of the Incarnation and 
the Resurrection have no raison d’ étre apart from the 
doctrines of sin and redemption, and it is clear that 
these doctrines lie at the heart of the Christian re- 
ligion—of the Gospel. The situation is serious and 
even critical when we are told from both sides that 
the doctrines of original sin and of redemption are in- 
compatible with the scientific doctrine of evolution. 

For fifteen hundred years—to go no further back 
than the time of Augustine—the doctrine of the Fall 
has furnished the base for the structure of Christian 
theology. Without the Fall, Catholic and Protestant 
theologians have united in declaring, there could be 
and need be no Redemption. A tradition or myth of 
a Fall has found its way into most of the ethnic faiths. 
Leading philosophers from Plato down have paid 
tribute to it. Kant speaks of the “radical evil of 
human nature” and of a “corrupt propensity rooted in 
men.” An acute American thinker thus paraphrases 
the words of the Prayer Book: 

“My life has been, if not an active rejection of the 
good, yet a long acquiescence in something less than 
good. I have failed to shake myself awake to the 
conditions of my own welfare. I have accepted with- 
out protest enjoyments I have not earned. I have 
not enquired into the right of my own ease. Back 
of all my passivity was an awareness that life has, 
after all, its conditions; and I have failed to force 
myself up to the exertion or hardship of learning 
them. .. . I have not known in detail what I ought 
to do, and I cannot be judged for what I have not 


EvoLUTION AND THE FALy, 129 


known, but I judge myself for living in an ignorance 
which my will knew could be overcome” (W. E. 
Hocking in “Human Nature and Its Remaking’’). 
With deeper insight into moral experience Bishop 
Moule, scholar and saint, has declared that the Apos- 
tle’s statement in Romans 5: 12-21 is the Scriptural 
expression of a consciousness deep as the awakened 
soul of man: 

“That I have not only sinned, but have been a sin- 
ful being from my first personal beginning; and that 
I ought not to be so, and ought never to have been so. 
It is my calamity, but it is also my accusation. This 
I cannot explain; but this I know. And to know this, 
with a knowledge not merely speculative but moral, 
is to be ‘shut up unto Christ,’ in a self-despair which 
can go nowhere else than to Him for acceptance, for 
peace, for holiness, for power.” 

The doctrine of the Fall has become the storm center 
of the present controversy between evolution and the- 
ology. Here is where the shoe pinches. To believe 
in the Fall is to believe in the transcendence of God 
in His holiness and in the transcendence of man over 
nature, coordinate truths which “‘iave both been ob- 
scured by the theory of evolution, and is to accept as 
well a supernatural scheme for man’s redemption. To 
deny the Fall is to take a different view of God and of 
man, of man’s present condition and of God’s pro- 
vision for man’s spiritual needs. The question is 
between anthropology as a branch of science, and an- 
thropology as a department of theology, and the con- 
troversy may be as prolonged and as serious in its is- 


130 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTIon 


sues for the church as the historic debate between 
Augustine and Pelagius. It will be convenient to no- 
tice the five possible relations which the theory of evo- 
lution may bear to the doctrine of the Fall. 

1. It is held that evolution excludes the Fall. We 
must exclude man from the operation of evolution or 
take the doctrine of the Fall out of our theology. To 
do the former would be to rob evolution of most of 
its interest for human beings, for a theory of descent 
which reached only from amceba to ape would excite 
very little public interest, and to do the latter would 
be to cut very deep into the scheme of evangelical 
Christianity. 

If the mental and moral as well as the physical en- 
dowments of man were the result of a gradual advance 
from an animal ancestry, there would be no place in 
this ascent in which to locate a Fall in the sense of a 
moral crisis of momentous importance to the race. 
Sin in its early stages would be merely immaturity or 
ignorance, and the first sin would be the most venial. 
A fault committed in the dawning of the moral con- 
sciousness and by a creature midway between homo- 
simius and pithecanthropus could never have had the 
moral consequences for all the race and for all time 
that are attributed to the historic Fall. The only Fall 
possible in this case was, in language ascribed to Theo- 
dore Parker, a “fall upward.” There was no height 
from which man could fall, unless the first “fall to 
rise’ was, as has been suggested, when man’s simian 
ancestor descended from the trees and stood on his 
hind legs. The issue is sharply drawn by an evolution- 


a 


EvoLUTION AND THE FALY 131 


ist who has lately said: ‘“‘We cannot accept the story 
of Eden and the Fall as history. ... And let us re- 
member that if this account of Eden and the Fall is 
not history, the current creeds of Christendom, not 
yet disavowed or revised, the theology still assumed, 
even where it is not directly preached—these have no 
footing in fact, they are but ‘such stuff as dreams are 
made of,’ they but cumber the ground of the church 
and the world and should no longer be allowed to 
impose upon the human understanding’ (Marion 
Shutter. See World’s Work, Oct., 1923, pp. 606, 607). 

It is not surprising that, yielding to the spirit of 
the age and to the logic of the situation, many have 
discarded the doctrine of the Fall, some with reluc- 
tance and others with alacrity. A number of theolo- 
gians of the liberal school have rejected the doctrine 
of the Fall at the behest of evolution. Thus Canon 
FE. W. Barnes, of Westminster Abbey, thinks that 
belief in the Fall is “not vital to Christianity,” and 


that the inevitable acceptance of evolution means the 
giving up of belief in the Fall and in the superstruc- 


ture of theological doctrine built upon it. Canon 
Barnes’ pronouncement was hailed as “a famous vic- 
tory—for the Freethinkers,”’ by the London Free- 
thinker; while a Catholic paper of Boston, The Pilot, 
said that “the decision of the highest tribunal of the 
Church on Biblical matters does not leave this matter 
open to discussion. .. . The doctrine of the Fall of 
man can never be expunged from the Bible. It is the 
word of Eternal Truth” (see The Literary Digest, 
Noy. 20, 1920). 


132 THE CHRISTIAN AND Evolution 


The doctrine of the Fall is an austere doctrine, un- 
popular in an age when “people are not worrying 
about their sins,” and uncomplimentary to human 
nature. Rather than confess daily that we are miser- 
able and fallen sinners, it is more flattering to human 
pride to acknowledge with complacency that we have 
come very far already, that every day we are getting 
better and better, and that, while there may be room 
for improvement, we have done on the whole remark- 
ably well. The Fall has naturally become with evo- 
lutionists “a principal subject of mirth and ridicule.” 
Says Willard L. Sperry: 


“The modern man feels that Adam has been a 
badly overworked character in human history 
and that he deserves now some eternal Sabbath 
of respite from the obloquy which our thankless 
predecessors cast on him... . It was, of course, the 
advent of the modern sciences which issued Adam 
his indeterminate ticket of moral leave in history 
and wrecked the whole grim system which has 
been built up around him. He remained a person to 
conjure with ethically until he was confronted by 
Darwin, Lyell, Spencer and Co. Since then he 
has been superseded by a half-erect biped with a 
sharply recessive forehead, somewhere along the 
line between Pithecanthropus erectus and Nean- 
derthal savage whose background is the nebular 
hypothesis and the primeval ooze; nebula, ooze 
and biped all alike simply non-moral (“The Dis- 
ciplines of Liberty,” 1921, p. 64). 


EVOLUTION AND THE FALL, 133 


Within the bounds of theology the Fall can be more 
easily dispensed with by the Jewish than by the Chris- 
tian theologian. The Jewish Encyclopedia declares 
that “Judaism, having never taught the doctrine of the 
Fall of Man, is not obliged to reject the evolutional 
theory on the ground that it conflicts with the dogma 
which demands the assumption of man’s original per- 
fections, and which thus inverts the process and se- 
quence posited by the evolutionists” (Art. “Evolu- 
tion,” vol. v, p. 282). The Christian theologian cannot 
dispose of the Fall without rejecting explicitly the 
Pauline doctrine taught in Romans 5, and much more 
of the Apostle’s system. There can be no doubt that 
on a fair exegesis of the passage mentioned the Apos- 
tle teaches that the sin of the first man brought an en- 
tail of sin and death upon the whole of humanity. 
The emphatic contrast repeated so many times in this 
passage between the sin of the one and its conse- 
quences incurred by the many leaves no doubt of the 
meaning on this point. 

2. Less summary in their dismissal of the Fall are 
those who hold that evolution interprets the Fall. The 
vocabulary of evolution has often been employed to 
describe the phenomena of sin. Sin in the individual 
and the race may be called reversion to type, arrested 
development, partially evolved conduct, want of con- 
formity to environment, transgression of the law of 
progress, refusal to evolve, resistance to the vital im- 
pulse. But in the transition from the animal to the 
human can there be found any place for a Fall or any 
explanation of the origin of sin? 


134 Tre CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


F. R. Tennant in his “Origin and Propagation of 
Sin’ (2d ed., 1908) has made the most notable at- 
tempt to answer these questions, giving up, indeed, 
the historic Fall, but trying on evolutionary principles 
to account for sinfulness and the universality of sin. 
Men are universally and inevitably sinners, according 
to Tennant, because they are descended from animals 
by ordinary generation. The clamorous self-assertive 
passions inherited from the animals become strongly 
intrenched, in primitive man and in every man, before 
the dawning of moral intelligence or conscience. Ten- 
nant is attempting to trace the evolution of sin, not 
the rise of the moral sense which makes sin possible. 
His theory is that at the beginnings of moral history 
(in the individual and the race) there is a chaos of 
instincts as yet unmoralized, rather than a fall from 
a previous higher condition. Amid this chaos of in- 
stincts the will stands neutral, without bias toward 
those which are condemned by the awakening moral 
sense. Yet sin—the choice of the lower impulses or 
the failure to obey the higher impulses—while it is 
not theoretically “‘an absolute necessity,” is yet “some- 
thing empirically inevitable for every man” (p. 113). 
There is thus a kind of racial Fall because of the over- 
powering strength of the animal or selfish impulses. 
When conscience at length demands the restraint of 
these impulses or passions it speaks with too weak a 
voice to secure obedience. Our evolutionary Hercules 
at the forks of the road is but a moral pigmy, and so 
inevitably chooses the wrong path, the line of least 
resistance. Instead of saying with the old theology, 


EvoLUTIoN AND THE FALt, 135 


that the old Adam is too strong for the young 
Melanchthon, we should say that the “old animal,” 
the ape and tiger passions, is too strong for the later 
appearing and less mature moral sentiments. 

The criticism is pertinent, that, if all men actually 
and inevitably sin, then sin is made inevitable by the 
constitution of their nature, and that, in the last anal- 
ysis, God is the author of sin. Again it is scarcely 
just to our animal “cousins” to hold them responsible 
for human sin. It is admitted that the impulses which 
make for the preservation and propagation of the 
species have no moral quality in the animals, and the 
sharing of these impulses by men does not account 
for human sin. The animal impulses are not the cause 
of sin, but sin is the cause of the perversion of these 
instincts in themselves innocent. The disorder or 
chaos in human nature is not the cause but the result 
of sin. 

It will be remembered that Hegel in his “Philosophy 
of History” says that the condition of innocence is 
the condition of animals only, that Paradise is a park 
where only animals and not man can live, and that the 
Fall is the eternal mythus of the way in which man 
became man. ‘There is at least this truth in Hegel’s 
exposition, that sin is not accounted for by what men 
share with or inherit from the animals, but by what 
men are in themselves as distinct from the animals. A 
healthy impulse of the early church led it to repudiate 
the Gnostic dualism which placed the locus of evil in 
matter, and the moral sentiment of the church of to- 


136 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


day will reject the theory, that the sin of man is due 
to his assumed genetic relation to the animals. 

As R. J. Campbell, who previously in his “New 
Theology” ridiculed the idea of a Fall, now says in 
“A Spiritual Pilgrimage,’ “By speaking of it [sin] 
as the remains of the ape and tiger qualities in our 
ascending humanity we belittle its tragedy, its terrible- 
ness, its ever-present menace.” ‘Tennant’s critics are 
agreed that his theory leaves no room for that cry of 
the contrite heart which not only confesses to separate 
acts of sin but declares: “I was shapen in iniquity; 
there is a law of sin and death in my members.” 

Utilizing the insights and the vocabulary of Berg- 
son’s philosophy, S. A. McDowall, in his “Evolution 
and the Need of Atonement,’ comes nearer than does 
Tennant to the traditional view of sin and the Fall. 
Sin with McDowall is not merely a failure to moralize 
the animal passions, but is a conscious resistance to 
the vital impulse which runs through all organic 
nature. It is the voluntary checking of the evolution- 
ary process which is the divine plan of human prog- 
ress. There is in every individual the realization that 
life has a purpose, and the feeling of a duty to pro- 
mote that purpose. When the individual opposes this 
movement of progress he allies himself with the forces 
of katabolism and destruction and thus checks the 
progress of the community and the nation. ‘The soli- 
darity of the race in sin is emphasized. ‘Tennant, as 
we have seen, could only admit a kind of racial Fall 
due to the overpowering strength of the animal or sel- 
fish passions. McDowall locates sin more definitely 


EvoLUTION AND THE FALL 137, 


in the conscious will, and the first sin might, in his 
construction, be called a Fall because it weakened the 
will to progress and made it harder for humanity to 
achieve its God-appointed goal. 

The difficulty in naturalistic schemes of evolution is 
the difficulty of accounting for man as a moral and 
spiritual being. Both sin and virtue lose their true 
character when interpreted by man’s relationship to 
the animals. We may speak of sin as failure to 
moralize the self-assertive animal passions, as refusal 
to cooperate with the vital impulse, as failure to pro- 
mote the health of social tissue, or with W. E.. Hock- 
ing, as “refusal to interpret crude impulses in terms 
of the individual’s most intelligent will to power’ 
(‘Human Nature and Its Remaking,” p. 116). The 
question however is unanswered: Why am I under 
any obligation to repress the animal passions, or to 
cooperate with the vital impulse, or to seek the well- 
being of society, or to interpret and exercise the will 
to power,—in case I do not wish to do any of these 
things? The possession by man of certain natural 
impulses supposed to be derived from the animals fur- 
nishes no reason. why these impulses should be re- 
pressed. An aggressive school of psychologists (the 
Freudian school), indeed, would say that the disorder 
in man’s nature consists precisely in the unnatural 
suppression of these impulses. If sin is defined with 
Bishop Gore as “the refusal of allegiance to God and 
rebellion against the law of our true being” (‘‘Belief 
in Christ,” 1923, p. 270), then we have an adequate 
definition of sin because sin is defined from our rela- 





138 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVoLutTIon 


tion to God and not from our relation to the lower pis 


animals. 

3. We may next consider the mediating theory that 
evolution while not explaining the Fall leaves room 
for the Fall, or at least in some way for its moral 
equivalent. If we accept the view of A. R. Wallace 
that man on his physical side is related genetically to 
the brutes, but that in his moral and spiritual nature 
he is the product of a spiritual influx or special crea- 
tion, the origin of man would then technically belong 
to the category of what the older theologians called 
“mediate creation,” that is, not creation ex mhilo, but 
the insertion into the complex of nature of something 
new, which what was previously existent in nature 
was not adequate to produce. The older doctrine of 
the Fall could thus be retained in spite of evolution. 
Man would be made in the image of God, there would 
be nothing in his relationship to the brute to necessi- 
tate or make inevitable the supremacy of his lower 
passions, his sin would indeed be a mystery (as it is on 
any theory), but the effect of his sin on his descend- 
ants would be open to discussion as it was in the day 
of Augustine and Pelagius. 

Drs. James Denney, Charles Gore and James Orr 
represent a school of theologians who are evangelical 
in their view of the seriousness and sinfulness of sin, 
but accept, with reservations, the evolutional account 
of man’s origin. Denney thinks that the origin of sin 
even with the Old and New Testaments before us can- 
not be explained. He regards the story of Genesis 3 
as frankly an etiological myth to explain human 


EVvoLUTION AND THE FAL, 139 





“misery. “This chapter does not contain history or 
dogma, but ethical experience expressed in mythical 
language. It is not the story of the first man, but of 
every man; and, if the key to its form is to be sought 
in comparative mythology, the key to its content can 
be found only in the soul.” 

Bishop Gore, as we have seen, is not concerned to 
remove the soul from the operation of evolution, and 
he is not specially interested in the question of the 
antiquity of man or in that of the single or multiple 
origin of the race. He believes, however, that “the 
emergence of the distinctively human faculties, and 
the place and manner of such emergence, are still in- 
volved in impenetrable obscurity” (‘Belief in Christ,” 
p. 274). He attaches the highest value to the early 
chapters of Genesis, taking them as symbols, not his- 
tory. “We see in them the clearest traces of divine 
inspiration. We see there true ideas about God and 
His mind—about the world and man’s relation to the 
world and his relation to God, about the origin of and 
nature of sin and its consequences, and about God’s 
dealings with man both in judgment and mercy—all 
so vividly expressed that a child can understand them 
and the imagination of mankind can never get rid of 
them” (p. 275). And, again, we can hold to the sub- 
stance of the Pauline doctrine, “if we take the Old 
Adam, not as an historical person, but as the symbol 
of our race as it has made itself by sin, to which by 
our birth and natural tradition we belong” (p. 278). 

Dr. Orr speaks of the narratives of Genesis as being 
clothed in “allegorical or figurative dress,” but as be- 


140 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


ing “the oldest and most precious traditions of our 
race, worthy in their intrinsic merit of standing where 
they do at the commencement of the Word of God, 
and capable of vindicating their right to be there: not 
merely, as most would allow, vehicles of great ideas, 
but presenting in their archaic way the memory of 
great historic truths. The story of the Fall, thus re- 
garded, is not a myth, but enshrines the shuddering 
memory of an actual moral catastrophe in the begin- 
ning of the race, which brought death into the world 
and all our woe” (‘Sin as a Problem of Today,” 1911, 
pp. 165, 166). 

Theologians who accept evolution but find an his- 
toric basis for the doctrine of the Fall in the Genesis 
narrative and the Pauline exposition must consider 
three points in the evolutionary scheme: (1) It is said 
that the sin of Adam could not affect his descendants 
_ because acquired characters are not transmitted. It 
is obvious, though, that the theory can be turned the 
other way, as is done by Giddings, who says that re- 
generation “does not reach or affect the germplasm, 
it cannot be biologically transmitted to subsequent 
generations; to this extent the Old Adam survives, but 
each generation, after it is born, can be morally re- 
generated in some degree” (as quoted by Lane, of. 
cit., p. 195). A distinguished evolutionist, Dr. Paul 
Kammerer of Vienna, has lately been in America 
claiming that he has proved by experiments that 
acquired characters can be inherited. In the present 
state of the debate it would be premature to draw im- 
portant inferences. 


EvoLUTION AND THE Fay 141 


(2) It is said that belief in the Fall is incompatible 
with belief in the extreme antiquity of man. It was 
the opinion of Dr. B. B. Warfield that “the question 
of the antiquity of man has of itself no theological 
significance,’ and that the question is “a purely scien- 
tific one, in which the theologian as such has no con- 
cern” (Princeton Theol. Rev., Jan., 1911, pp. 1 and 
11). The Bible he claims does not assign a brief span 
to human existence, and some ten to twenty thousand 
years is the limit to human existence according to 
sober scientists. The genealogies in Genesis are re- 
garded as compressed with numerous missing links 
and so as supplying no grounds for chronological in- 
ference. On this view it would take the life span of 
only a few Methuselahs to fill out the measure of the 
fifteen or even twenty-five thousand years usually re- 
quired for the beginnings of the Cro-Magnon race, or 
homo sapiens. It would be more difficult to find any 
historic residuum in the antediluvian narratives of 
Genesis if the origin of the human race is placed, as 
has been suggested, nearer 400,004 B. C. than 4,004. 
In all the discussion it must be remembered that geo- 
logical chronology is still in an unsettled state. 

(3) On the question of the unity of the human race 
Dr. Warfield asserts in the article alluded to that “the 
whole structure of the Bible’s teaching, including all 
that we know as its doctrine of salvation, rests on it 
and implicates it” (pp. 18, 19). ‘The unity of the 
old man in Adam is the postulate of the unity of the 
new man in Christ” (p. 25). Darwin, in his “Descent 
of Man,” said, that ‘‘those naturalists who admit the 


142 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


principle of evolution . . . will feel, no doubt, that ail 
the races of men are descended from a single primi- 
tive stock” (2d ed., p. 176). To admit multiple origin 
in the case of the races of men might lead to the hy- 
pothesis of multiple origins, as advocated by E. Was- 
mann, to account for the broader differences in the 
organic world, and this view would be looked upon 
with suspicion by orthodox evolutionists. Dr. F. G. 
Crookshank, in his “The Mongol in Our Midst,” has 
proposed the novel theory, based on the evidence of 
posture, palmistry and other correspondences, that the 
three human groups of Mongols, Negroes and Whites 
have each a separate origin, being derived respectively 
from the orang-utan, the gorilla and the chimpanzee. 
On Crookshank’s theory the line of descent from 
known animal forms to the human, which most evo- 
lutionists believe has never been crossed, proves to 
have been crossed three times at three different points. 
It would be strange if evolution, unifying nature, 
should break up the unity of the human race. As 
Edward Caird has said, ““The divisions between men 
are as nothing in comparison with the fundamental 
fact of self-consciousness which unites them all to 
each other” (“The Evolution of Religion,” 1, p. 15). 
The evolutionist, it appears, is in something of a di- 
lemma. If mankind sprang from a single pair, the 
origin of this pair becomes a unique or even miracu- 
lous event not to be accounted for by natural law; but 
if multiple origin be assumed for the races of men, 
then the multiple origin of widely different species 
and genera may also be postulated. 


EvoLUtTION AND THE FALL, 143 


4, It is sometimes maintained that the Fall inter- 
prets evolution. ‘The tables are turned when the at- 
tempt is made to solve the problems of evolution by 
assuming a pre-mundane or pre-organic Fall. C. W. 
Formby, in his “Unveiling of the Fall” (1923), claims 
that his theory of a pre-organic Fall gives “a clearer 
and more complete explanation of evolution than any 
existing” (p. 181), while Canon Peter Green, in 
“The Problem of Evil” (1920), is convinced “of the 
need for the acceptance of a pre-mundane fall, as 
absolutely necessary for any adequate view of physical 
and moral evil’ (p. 133). 

Formby holds that a being made in the image of 
God originally existed in a state of holiness before 
life began on the earth; that this being, in some way 
combining in himself all the individual wills now 
known as men, rebelled against God, and that thus his 
sin became the sin of all; that the vital impulse, in 
some way identified with the being who fell, then 
started upon the career of evolution which was in part 
a cruel and destructive process, because the vital im- 
pulse had become sin-stricken and vitiated at its root, 
and was also in part a redemptive and restorative 
process which was completed in the work of Christ. 
It is held that this theory is the hidden meaning be- 
neath the allegory of Genesis, that it may be read be- 
tween the lines in Paul, who spoke wisdom among the 
perfect, that it does justice to the universality and the 
guilt of sin in man and sheds light upon the pain and 
strife in the whole evolutionary process, and that in 


10 


144. Tas CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


short it satisfies the demands of both science and 
theology. 

Both Formby and Green, whose exposition is some- 
what similar, as we see turn the tables on Tennant 
and McDowall. Immaturity of the moral instincts is 
not the cause of sin, but sin is the cause of the im- 
maturity; resistance to the vital impulse is not the 
cause of sin, for the vital impulse is itself vitiated at 
its source. ‘This bold and highly speculative doctrine 
—this “hazardous and desperate guess’—of the extra- 
temporal or pre-organic origin of sin will scarcely 
commend itself either to scientific or to theological 
orthodoxy. It cuts the Gordian knot of the problem 
of evolution and the Fall, but only to raise more seri- 
ous difficulties, exegetical and philosophical, of its 
own. ; 
5. We come to the final possibility that the Fall ex- 
cludes evolution. ‘This attitude is often taken by those 
who have reacted against the theory of evolution be- 
cause of its alleged anti-Christian teaching, extrava- 
gant claims, faulty logic or lack of convincing proof. 
They insist that wide-ranging inferences need to be 
carefully distinguished from experimental facts, and 
that the theory of evolution in the judgment of lead- 
ing scientists is in so transitional a state as to afford 
no secure basis for metaphysical inference or theolog- 
ical construction. If it be insisted that belief in evo- 
lution and belief in the Fall exclude each other, the 
advocate of the Biblical view will not be slow in the 
present state of the discussion to accept the challenge, 
believing that no proved fact of science disproves the 


EVOLUTION AND THE Farr, 145 


Fall, and that the evidence for the Fall in the Bible, 
in conscience and in the condition of human society 
is stronger and more convincing than the evidence of 
descent from brute ancestors, No line of descent and 
no natural method of descent has yet been discovered 
leading from the beasts that perish to man as an im- 
mortal being. ‘To quote again from Professor More: 
“In spite of the speculations of centuries we have not 
advanced a step beyond the noble and dignified de- 
scription of the creation as imagined by the Hebrew 
prophet in the book of Genesis. We can dismiss his 
story of the Garden of Eden as an allegory, but when 
he stated that man was created out of the dust and 
that God breathed into him the breath of Life, all 
was said of that supreme mystery, as an eminent phi- 
losopher pointed out to me, which can be said” 
(“Dogma of Evolution,” pp. 242, 243). The predic- 
tion may be ventured that for the most reliable infor- 
mation about human origins and the moral history of 
mankind the thoughts of men will continue to turn to 
the majestic opening chapters of the Bible long after 
the hypothetical ape-man has been forgotten, 


wu, 
Led rit ue 


> 


Able 





CHAPTER X 


EVOLUTION AND REVELATION 


“The very fact that all the nations (except the Jews) have 
traveled along a line leading to polytheism, and that all have failed 
to get beyond it, constitutes a presumption that monotheism is 
not to be reached by the route that leads to polytheism.” FRANK 
Byron JEVONS. 


“Superstition and magic could not have arisen if the idea of 
another world than this world of nature had not been deeply im- 
printed on man’s self-consciousness. ‘They themselves are of a 
later origin, but they presuppose religion, which is inherent in 
human nature, having its foundation and principle in the creation 
of man in the image of God. Hence religion is, not only with 
reference to its origin and essence, but also with reference to its 
truth and validity, founded in revelation. Without revelation re- 
ligion sinks back into a pernicious superstition.”—HERMAN 
BAVINCK. 


=~ 


“For my own part, having studied the prophets and the Gospels 
all my life long and asked myself this crucial question more 
times than I could enumerate, I can give but one answer. I be- 
lieve their claim is true. It is a momentous decision morally, and 
it is momentous no less intellectually, because, if I mistake not, 
it dominates the intellectual situation.’"—CHaries Gore, 


x 
EVOLUTION AND REVELATION 


ELIGIOUS people of all schools are commonly 
R agreed in regarding two propositions as axio- 

matic: first, that Jesus was the greatest of re- 
ligious teachers, and second, that God is love. ‘The 
two propositions practically merge into one, for if 
Jesus is the greatest of teachers His teaching is to be 
followed and believed; and in every word and act of 
His life He taught that God is love. 

The evolutionist who believes in the love of God is 
placed in a peculiar dilemma. He must, in taking a 
broad view which includes religious history as well 
as natural history, either give up his favorite maxim 
that there are “no gaps and no intrusions,” “no alien 
influxes,”’ and ‘no insertions ab extra,’ or else he 
must give up his belief in a God of love with its in- 
evitable corollary that He has broken the silence of 
eternity and revealed His love in some direct and un- 
mistakable manner to His children. In the latter case 
the highest conception of God that has been enter- 
tained by the human mind will have to be abandoned 
and declension in religion will be the result. Natural- 
istic evolution, the evolution of no gaps and no intru- 
sions, means the silence of God. He is as helpless as 
the Tithonus of ancient fable who lost his voice, and, 
if indeed He exists at all, He is not specially inter- 
ested in us nor can we be in Him. 

149 


150 Tue CHRISTIAN AND EvoLurIon 


If God is personal and if God is love, then the prob- 
ability that He has spoken to man amounts to prac- 
tical certainty. On the analogy of human relationships 
—the only analogy that is applicable to the case—it is 
incredible that one person should be supremely inter- 
ested in another and yet never give or attempt to give 
direct and unmistakable expression of his love by voice 
or message or gift or sign. If God is love and cannot 
reveal His love it is a strange inability, and if He does 
not express His love it is an equally strange indiffer- 
ence. If love is an essential or the most essential at- 
tribute of God, how will that love most naturally and 
fully reveal itself? A noted astronomer, Professor 
Charles Young, in an eloquent lecture on ‘‘God’s 
Glory in the Heavens,’ used to say that he saw in 
the heavens evidence of the wisdom, power and 
majesty of God, but that he found there no evidence 
of His love. Nor is the love of God unmistakably 
exhibited in history or general providence. ‘To say 
that God is love is to say, as Josiah Royce has re- 
marked, that He is, or has been or will be incarnate. 
The logic of the argument of John, the Apostle of 
love, cannot be escaped (1 John 4:8-12): “God is 
love. Herein was the love of God manifested in us, 
that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the 
world that we might live through him.” If God is 
love at all, there must be at the very least some per- 
sonal revelation of the heart of God given to meet the 
deepest needs of the heart of man. The New Testa- 
ment teaches that His love was revealed through the 
life and death of the Word that was made flesh. 


EvoLution AND REVELATION 151 


The reality of revelation can be denied in two ways: 
by an agnostic theory of knowledge and by an evo- 
lutionary account of the origin of theism which shows 
it to be an illusion. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher 
of evolution, as Huxley was its apologist, exemplifies 
both of these methods. He first proclaimed that God 
was unknowable and then was compelled to give an 
account of the way in which a supposed knowledge 
of God arose. ‘There is, of course, the wise and rev- 
erent agnosticism of the book of Job: ‘“‘Canst thou 
by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the 
Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; 
what canst thou do? Deeper than Sheol; what canst 
thou know?” But the agnosticism of Spencer was 
of a different kind. Under the guise of humility it 
covered an overweening intellectual pride. The criti- 
cism has been made a hundred times that Spencer had 
to know a great deal about God before he could pro- 
claim Him to be unknowable. He must, for instance, 
find out that God was not personal before he could be 
sure that He could not reveal Himself to man. J. G. 
Schurman, not too severely, speaks of the “farce of 
nescience playing at omniscience in setting the bounds 
of science” (‘‘Agnosticism and Religion,’ 1896, p. 
100). Agnosticism is a polite way of saying that God 
cannot speak in the works of nature, or in the mind 
and conscience of man, or more directly and clearly 
in the prophets and in His Son. 

Many theists today hold that ethical monotheism is 
a development from lower and less pure forms of be- 
lief. If astronomy developed from astrology why 


152 Tue CHRISTIAN AND Evolution 


could not the highest and purest conception of God 
and the surest knowledge of God have arisen from 
magic or ancestor worship or belief in ghosts, or ani- 
mism or from social taboos? It is significant, how- 
ever, that the leading, and perhaps the most logical, 
thinkers who give an evolutionary account of religion 
treat it as a delusion. It is natural to suppose that if 
belief in God is evolved out of something lower it 
will in turn develop into something higher which will 
supercede it. From the earliest to the latest popular 
exponents of the evolution of religion, we see the same 
principle at work. Belief in God is regarded as an 
illusion, the only question being as to just how the il- 
-lusion arose. Comte, tracing religion through the 
stages of fetishism, polytheism and monotheism, 
teaches that it is superceded by the metaphysical and 
finally by the positive phases of thought. Sir J. G. 
Frazer in “The Golden Bough” would show how man- 
kind progresses from magic to religion and then from 
religion to science. According to Spencer, the first 
stage in the development of religion is ancestor wor- | 
hip, while the final stage is the worship of the Un- 
knowable. Durkheim would merge the religious in 
the social, while Reinach regards religion as “a sum 
of scruples which impede the free exercise of our 
faculties” (“Orpheus,” E. T., p. 3). 

When Andrew Lang in his “Making of Religion” 
maintained that savages of the most “primitive” type 
of culture have a clear idea of a High God or Supreme 
Spirit who demanded righteous conduct, he was a voice 
crying in the wilderness. The theory that held the 


EvoLutIion AND REVELATION 153 


field was that all higher forms of religion are derived 
from lower forms, and that truly primitive religion 
was the lowest of all. Early man, whose religion was 
supposed to be nearest to that of the lowest savages, 
could have had no conception of God, for this was 
the result of a long development. As Darwin said: 
“The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does 
not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has 
been elevated by long-continued culture” (“Descent of 
Man,” p. 613). 

In recent years evidence has been coming in from 
historians of religion, from anthropologists, from psy- 
chologists, from missionaries and travelers which has 
shaken the evolutionary view and has even turned the 
scales in favor of the opposite theory. Thus W. 
Warde Fowler in his “Roman Ideas of Deity,” 1914, 
refers to the “evidence for the idea of one great deity 
surviving among uncultured or half-cultivated peo- 
ples.” Speaking of F. B. Jevons, he says: “If I 
understand him rightly, all these later systems (poly- 
demonism and fetishism) which I have called the 
growth that chokes the idea of the Supreme, imply a 
belief in some divine personality. Flinders Petrie 
again, fresh from the enormous polytheism of ancient 
Egypt, insists that monotheism is the first stage trace- 
able in theology, and uses almost the same language 
as Lang about it. So, too, Count Goblet d’ Alviella, 
whose knowledge of religions is vast, seems in his 
Hibbert Lectures disposed to trace the Indian and 
Greek religious philosophy which developed the later 
ideas of monotheism, back to an age before the full 
development of polytheism” (pp. 30 and 35). 


154 Tue CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


Similarly J. H. Leuba in his “A Psychological 
Study of Religion,’ 1912, maintains that “the idea 
of a mighty maker of things may safely be attributed 
to men as low in intelligence as are the lowest tribes 
now extant, for it appears very early in the child” (p. 
96). Of the old opinion that “even the lowest savage 
entertains a belief in a Supreme Being, however dimly 
conceived and little reverenced,”’ he says that “recent 
anthropological researches furnish sufficient evidence 
to warrant a return to this view. It seems now estab- 
lished that in every part of Australia, except perhaps 
among the Arunta, a tribe in the central regions, there 
is a belief in an All-Father, who perhaps is always 
regarded as a creator. In Africa there also exists, it 
seems, a general belief in a great God conceived as 
creator” (p. 100). 

Travelers and missionaries, as well as scientific 
observers, vouch for a belief among savages in a 
higher power with the simultaneous worship of lower 
powers. In the hearing of the present writer reputable 
missionaries have testified to such an underlying the- 
istic belief among uncivilized people. A missionary 
from Africa said that the natives confessed that they 
believed in a Supreme Spirit, but when asked why 
they did not worship Him declared that He had left 
them and was the white man’s God. A missionary 
from Alaska told how the natives said that they heard 
the voice of the Great Spirit in the wind and storm 
but that He was far off and they could not see Him 
and so worshiped their totem poles. 

A scientifically trained missionary who has had a 


EvoLutTioN AND REVELATION 155 


rich experience among savages, J. Warneck, was led 
by the observed facts to overcome a previous preju- 
dice, and as quoted by Chamberlain he writes: ‘That 
this pure idea of God could be the result of a long 
development in the sense that the peoples begin with 
animistic conceptions, under the impulses of fear and 
the worship of animals and ancestors and from that 
advance to nature-worship from which the gods arise, 
and that thereupon through a rich polytheism the 
gradually refined conception of One God is elaborated 
(so runs the well-known orthodox doctrine)—this 
hypothesis contradicts the pictures which every one 
who is intimate with actual heathenism and does not 
see it through spectacles, wins from it. The idea of 
God does not lie on the road of development from the 
worship of spirits, it contradicts this development. It 
is an alien element in the world of animistic concep- 
tions. It stands in opposition to the nature deities” 
(Quoted from Die Lebenskrafte des Evangeliums, in 
Mensch und Gott, 1921, p. 25). 
Travelers tell the same story. “I was informed by 
a great traveler who has done much scientific work 
in the islands of the Pacific and of the Indian Ocean, 
that he had never come across a tribe which did not 
entertain a belief in some Big God or Great Spirit 
_. who made the whole world, even though they rarely 
| worshiped Him, because He seemed so far away, and 
hespectalty because He was the God of other tribes as 
well, while their own gods were very near and wanted 
constant attention, and moreover were more likely to 
help them in war” (Stewart A. McDowall, “Evolution 


156 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTIONn 


and the Need of the Atonement,” 1912, p. 68). As to 
the reason why the high God, among rude peoples, is 
not more often the object of worship, Leuba’s ex- 
planation does not differ in essence from that of 
writers like Andrew Lang and Sir W. M. Ramsay, or 
even from that of Paul in the first chapter of Romans: 
“Because His very greatness and remoteness stand as 
an obstacle in the way of practical relations, while 
ordinary spirits and great ancestors, more familiar 
and closer to man than a Maker, call forth more read- 
ily those methods of propitiation and worship consti- 
tuting the lowest religious expression” (op. cit., p. 
106). If the higher idea had been derived from the 
‘lower, the proportionate importance of the two in wor- 
| ship would naturally be reversed. 

While the matter is still under discussion, the evo- 
lutionists are becoming less dogmatic and advocates 
of a primitive endowment in man leading him to belief 
in God are becoming more bold. A comparison of 
two recent writers will show the present state of the 
question. A fair and temperate statement by an evo- 
lutionist, E. Washburn Hopkins, in his “Origin and 
Fyvolution of Religion,’ 1923, shows the inadequacy 
of the current evolutional theories in accounting for 
‘the origin of religion. He criticizes the English 
theory of animism (Tylor and Spencer) because in 
fact not every natural object is regarded as being alive 
and having a spirit within it. He rejects the German 
theory of naturalism (Max Miiller) because not every 
object is personified. Frazer’s theory that man tries 
to control nature by magic and then moves from magic 


EvoLuTIoN AND REVELATION 157 


to prayer is said to be open to Durkheim’s objection 
that magic is the child of religion and not vice versa. 
Durkheim’s own theory—the French theory—of 
totemism, the totem being a symbol of the group and 
religion being social in origin, is criticized because 
this would make the mind of the group “overwhelm- 
ingly coercive.” “The French theory does not hesi- 
tate to insist that man does not think at all as an 
individual; there is no such thing as an individual 
mentality and consequently all religious thought is 
social” (p. 7). Hopkins himself emphasizes the com- 
plexity of human nature and the influence of great 
personalities in accounting for the varieties of religion. 
He admits that “the psychological processes of prim- 
itive man cannot be known” (p. 2), but clings to the 
evolutional view, more, it seems, as a deduction from 
the general theory of evolution than as an induction 
. from observed facts: “Since man has developed from 
a state even lower than savagery and was once intel- 
lectually a mere animal, it is reasonable to attribute 
to him in that state no more religious consciousness 
than is possessed by an animal” (p. 1). 

The other side of the question is maintained by 
Houston Stewart Chamberlain in his Mensch und 
Gott, 1921. He says that “the researches of the last 
half century—contrary to the hitherto almost uni- 
versal supposition—have shown beyond question that 
the conception of a Deity, and even of One who is 
unitary, conceivable (monotheistic), invisible, omni- 
present, is lacking in no tribe of the earth... . All 


developments of polytheism, all over-subtle elaboration 


158 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


of confessions (dogmas), all ritualistic aberrations 
are evidence of later culture and at most leave the 
conception of one original God untouched, even though 
this be pushed back behind the crowd of later con- 
ceptions” (p. 2). Referring to the works of Andrew 
Lang (“The Making of Religion’), P. W. Schmidt 
(Der Ursprung der Gottesidee) and of Leopold van 
Schroeder (Arische Religion, Band I), Chamberlain 
says: “Under every sky, in North and South as on 
the equator, in Asia and America as in Australia, 
Oceania and Africa, everywhere, where the human 
race exists, there can be found the conception of a 
supreme Being—the conception of God—likened, in 
Lang’s phrase, to ‘a magnified, supernatural man.’ 
Significant for this supreme Being is it that He is al- 
ways represented as good, often as the guardian of 
virtue who teaches (so for example among the admit- 
tedly degraded Australian Negroes) chastity, sym- 
pathy, unselfishness, and fidelity to one’s plighted 
word. Not less significant is, however, the small place 
which this Being receives in the public worship, since 
He always remains in the dark background of con- 
sciousness, while apparitions of spirits and demons 
and even.of gods display themselves in the foreground 
OLMITeHCp.Za). 

The fact of this all-pervading conception of God 
was late in being discovered by ethnologists and mis- 
sionaries “because uncivilized men allowed it to re- 
main unmentioned, partly from reserve, partly from 
dull indifference” (p. 2). It was slow in gaining rec- 
ognition in scientific circles, Chamberlain thinks, be- 


EvoLuTIoN AND REVELATION 159 


cause of the prejudices of our scientists and dogmatic 
evolutionists—with Herbert Spencer at their head. 

In its application to the field of the science and his- 
tory of religion, we find that evolution is a dogma 
unsupported by the facts and in the judgment of those 
who are most familiar at first hand with “primitive” 
religion at variance with them. Religious history in 
general is quite susceptible of the Pauline interpre- 
tation in the first chapter of Romans (vs. 18 to 25): 
that there has been a self-disclosure of God through 
nature to the mind and conscience of men—‘‘God 
manifested it unto them’; and that men, instead of 
responding by gratitude and obedience to the natural 
revelation, have by pride and self-will turned away 
from the light and “exchanged the truth of God fora 
lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than 
the Creator.” 

We can only glance at the application of evolution 
to the field of “revealed” religion in the Old Testa- 
ment. The monotheism of the Old Testament comes 
to a climax in the opening words of Genesis, in 
Deuteronomy and in the later chapters of Isaiah. “In 
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 
.. . And God said, Let there be light: and there was 
light” (Gen. 1:1, 3); “See now that I, even I, am he, 
and there is no god with me:.I kill, and I make alive; 
I wound, and I heal; and there is none that can de- 
liver out of my hand” (Deut. 32:39); ‘Thus saith 
Jehovah that created the heavens, the God that formed 
the earth and made it, that established it and created 
it not a waste, that formed it to be inhabited: I am 

11 


160 THe CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


Jehovah; and there is none else” (Isa. 45: 18, and cf. 
vs. 5, 6, 12, 14, 21 and 22). The first chapter of 
Genesis has well been called “the magna charta of eth- 
ical monotheism, a bulwark against the polytheism and 
the pantheism of the ancient world.” Alluding to the 
repeated assertions of the sole and transcendent exist- 
ence of God scattered through the later chapters of 
Isaiah, George Adam Smith says we have here a 
Monotheism so absolute that ‘modern critical phi- 
losophy, in surveying the history of religion, can find 
for it no rival among the faiths of the world. ... It 
is already as lofty an idea of the unity and sovereignty 
of God, as the thoughts of man can follow” 
(visaiah,’)vohai ip, 230). 

What then is the source of this high monotheism 
of the prophets? The source in the opinion of the 
prophets themselves was the direct and personal reve- 
lation made by God, it may be in various ways, to 
their own spirits. The evolutionary view is that it 
was the result of a gradual attainment by man of a 
higher and purer religious faith, only reached after 
_ the stages of animism and polytheism had been tra- 
versed. In the evolutionary view man reaches up to 
God, perhaps only to find Him a delusion; in the 
Biblical view God reaches down to man. 

The progress of revelation in the Old ‘Testament 
or the Bible as a whole is often pointed out as a proof 
or striking illustration of evolution. ‘There is a form 
of teaching adapted to the childhood of the race, and 
then in the fullness of time God sends forth His Son. 
In divers portions and manners God spoke to the fa- 


EvoLution AND REVELATION 161 


thers in the prophets, but at last speaks through His 
Son. There is doubtless a progressive revelation in 
the Old and New Testaments, but as the initiative in 
both cases comes from God, if we are to believe the 
Biblical writers, we are in the sphere of education 
from without rather than of evolution from within. 

The attempt is sometimes made to account for the 
Prophetic monotheism by the genius of the Jewish 
people, by the general movement of religious thought 
of the time, or by the influence of the unconscious. 
The statement of Renan that the Semitic people had 
a genius for monotheism is now discredited. The rec- 
ords that we have all show that the people as a whole 
- had rather a genius for the worship of Baal and other 
heathen deities and for idolatry. In fact it took the 
forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the cen- 
turies of divine judgments and then the captivity in 
Babylon before the people were cured of idolatry. 
Often in Israel’s history we have examples of mono- 
theism degenerating into polytheism, but really no 
example in the history of Israel or of other peoples 
of polytheism developing naturally into monotheism. 
The natural development is into a pantheism of the 
Stoic sort. As Bavinck has pointed out: “We have 
no historical testimony to the development of poly- 
theism into pure monotheism; when polytheism comes 
no longer to satisfy the intellectual circles, it is re- 
modelled into pantheism, which has in common with 
polytheism the ‘nature-character’ of the godhead, and 
dissolves the multitude of nature-gods into one nature- 
godhead” (‘““The Philosophy of Revelation,” 1909, p. 
185). 


162 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


In his “Outline of History,’ H. G. Wells speaks of 
the prophetic teaching of a God who lived in a temple 
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, and 
adds: “There can be little doubt of a great body of 
such thought and utterance in Babylonia, Egypt, and 
throughout the Semitic east. The prophetic books of 
the Bible can be but specimens of the prophesyings 
of that time” (3d ed., 1923, p. 234). That mono- 
theism was “in the air’ at that special time and that 
there was a development in this direction in other 
nations parallel to that in Israel is an assumption in 
support of which no facts are adduced. 

The evolutionary critic of the Graf-Wellhausen 
school reconstructs both the history and the religion 
of the Jews. He must assume in order to reconstruct 
the history that the writings which teach a high mono- 
theism, such as the Pentateuch, and the Psalms, must 
have been later than the time of Amos and Hosea; 
but he must assume also, in order to support the evo- 
lution theory that these writings contain in themselves 
survivals of a primitive animism and traces of a gross 
polytheism. ‘The transition to monotheism must not 
be too abrupt and so it is held that the polemic against 
idolatry found in numerous passages in Amos and 
Hosea (such as “Ephraim is joined to idols,’ Hosea 
4:17) has been injected later into the writings of 
these prophets (see “Journal of Biblical Literature,” 
vol. xliii, 1924, p. 232). 

In no other literature except the Hebrew has this 
elaborate process of decomposing into minute frag- 
ments and then putting together again been carried 


Evo,ution AND REVELATION 163 


out. The histories of Herodotus, who has been called 
“the father of lies,’ have never been subjected to so 
drastic a treatment in the effort to separate truth from 
falsehood. The tendency today in Homeric criticism 
is to attribute the substance of the Iliad and that of 
the Odyssey each to a single mind, or both to a single 
mind. So little is known of the personality of 
Shakespeare that his dramas would furnish a fertile 
field for the divisive critic, who would assign different 
plays or portions of plays to different authors, but the 
only serious attempt to overthrow tradition is the 
Baconian hypothesis which attributes the Shakes- 
pearean dramas and the Novum Organum and Essays 
to the single mind of Francis Bacon. 

Of the attempt to explain the teaching of the 
prophets psychologically and to derive them from 
purely human sources in the subliminal or unconscious 
mind, Bishop Gore well says that we find in this region 
no materials for the spiritual content of the prophetic 
teaching. The origin of the prophet’s message is not 
to be sought in an uprush from the subconscious but 
rather in “a downrush from the superconscious” 
(“Belief in God,” p. 106). The prophetic monotheism 
remains a unique thing in the history of religion. 
There is nothing like it even in the religious history 
of Greece, although gifted spirits like Plato and the 
Neo-Platonists caught glimpses of a lofty monotheism. 
Plato in his Republic condemns the grossness of the 
popular polytheism, but the Socrates both of Plato 
and of Xenophon uses the terms “God” and “Gods” 
almost interchangeably, and there is no indignant re- 


164 THE CHRISTIAN AND EVoLUtTION 


pudiation of idolatry as degrading to man and as in- 
sulting to God. Harnack has a high opinion of the 
lofty spirituality of the Neo-Platonists but he admits 
that “Christianity really did away with polytheism, 
whereas the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Porphyry did 
not possess the courage for that: herein lay the great- 
est difference. ‘This religious philosophy lacked the 
power of exclusiveness, and of that lack it died” 
(‘Hibbert Journal,” Oct., 1911, p. 81). 

The victory of evolution in the field of religion ap- 
peared at one time to be complete and easily won, but 
the victory has been short-lived. The evolution of re- 
ligion, if it means anything more than the history of 
its multiple forms and changes, breaks down at the 
two crucial points of the origin of religion and its 
climax in the ethical monotheism of the prophets. 
Neither the history of “natural religion” nor that of 
revealed religion can be forced into the evolutionary 
mold. There is a growing body of evidence to show 
that belief in a Supreme Spirit who demands right 
conduct is the prius and presupposition of nature- 
worship and polytheism rather than their result. The 
most significant feature of the history of religion, the 
teaching of the prophets and of Jesus, is without ex- 
planation on evolutionary grounds, and requires the 
explanation which the prophets themselves, followed 
by the New Testament writers, have given, that God 
has revealed Himself in direct and preferential action, 
that God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, 
and that holy men of old spoke as they were moved 
by the Holy Spirit. 


CHAPTER XI 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLE 


“It is not upon any @ priort considerations that objections either 
to the supposed efficacy of prayer or to the supposed occurrences 
of miracles can be based, and to my mind the fatal objection to 
both these suppositions is the inadequacy of the evidence to prove 
any given case of such occurrence which has been adduced.’”— 
T, H. Huxtey. 


“Historical records tells us of a Divine Incarnation. We may 
consider it freely on historical grounds. We are not debarred 
from contemplating such a thing by anything that science has to 
say to the contrary. Science does not speak directly on the sub- 
ject.’—Sir Oxiver Lonce. 


“If the aversion to miracles is simply an expression of belief 
in a purely mechanical self-contained world, then the human 
spirit must hail them in defence of its own liberty. For if God 
be so bound by His laws that initiative is no longer His, much 
more are we. And if He cannot intervene in the physical realm, 
still less can He do so in the spiritual, for the two stand in close 
relationship. The miracle is the sign of the Divine freedom.”— 
James Y, SIMPSON, 


XI 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLE 


HE, intrusion of the supernatural—if the more 

direct and personal activity of God in His own 

world be called an intrusion—is made neces- 
sary by the fact of sin. Miracle is the intervention of 
God in His own world to counteract by His saving 
activity the destructive effects of sin. 

Evolution in one of its aspects is an attempt to keep 
God at a distance. In so far as it presumes to teach 
metaphysical and religious doctrine, it may be called 
an intellectual Tower of Babel, the product of human 
pride, erected in the attempt of the human mind to 
get along in its theorizing activities without God. If 
God is admitted at all, He is relegated to an unimpor- 
tant position, remote in time and impotent in influ- 
ence, so that He becomes practically, so far as the 
course of events is concerned, a negligible quantity. 
If admitted into the scheme of nature at all, He is 
limited in His activity to the remotest past. It has 
been said that “by grace of the evolutionist the AI- 
mighty is allowed to come forth, create, give life, set 
in motion, and look on the scene, but then He must 
retire, and leave the whole to nature and its laws.” 
If by courtesy He is allowed to assume the role of a 
spiritual underpinning, this underpinning is never by 
any possibility permitted to break through or appear 

: 167 


168 Tre CHRISTIAN AND Evolution 


on the surface. The philosophy of evolution, operat- 
ing with the concept of continuity, eventuates in a 
deistic or pantheistic naturalism, and as has been truly 
said, “Deism banishes God from the universe, but all 
forms of Pantheism imprison Him in it” (A. B. 
Davidson). 

The immediate action of God is never allowed to 
appear in the world of time and sense—that is in the 
actual world. God is a partner with nature (if not 
identical with it) but He is a sleeping partner. He 
lives, but as Carlyle complained to Froude in a 
moment of pessimism, ‘He does nothing.” God may 
indeed be allowed to act everywhere provided always 
that He act nowhere in any way that would make a 
difference at that point. He is excluded from acting 
in any direct way in the field of history. Even in the 
field of religious experience the evolutionist would 
place God in a straight-jacket. “In the psychology of 
religious experience creative miracles do not occur.” 
God is not to be thought of, much less worshiped 
apart from the world. “Of God in isolation from the 
world,” says Lloyd Morgan in his “Emergent Evolu- 
tion,’ 1923, “I can form no adequate conception” (p. 
299). What is really admired or worshiped is the All, 
the absolute inclusion or unity, with the consequent 
blurring of ethical distinctions. As Bosanquet says: 
“The universe is the magnificent theater of all the 
wealth of life, and good and evil are within it” (“The 
Value and Destiny of the Individual,” 1913, p. 312). 
To a monistic type of thought the idea of a transcend- 
ent Creator or moral Governor, or of a hearer and 


Evolution AND MirAcLE 169 


answerer of prayer, or of a God who can raise the 
dead, or even the Kantian postulate of a God who 
will equate happiness and goodness, is of course un- 
acceptable. -As Bosanquet says again: “For our 
straightforward reason and humanity today, the sheer 
existence of this external: person has but little interest. 
What we care for is the religious consciousness” (p. 
22). 

A distinguished evolutionist has tried to equate 
Christianity with the religion of evolution, but Chris- 
tianity shorn of its miraculous element loses much in 
the process. It must contract its horizon so as to limit 
its view to the present life. ‘The religion of evolu- 
tion deals with this world rather than with the next. 
It prays “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on 
earth.’ It seeks to build here and now “The City of 
God’” (E. G. Conklin, “The Direction of Human 
Evolution,” new ed., 1923, p. 246). Christianity re- 
duced to the meager dimensions of the religion of evo- 
lution must eliminate the supernatural all along the 
line. ‘Almost every religion claims to have had a 
supernatural origin, to have been made known to men 
by supernatural revelation, to be attested by super- 
natural miracles, to influence the lives of men in a 
supernatural manner and to lead to supernatural re- 
wards or punishments in a future supernatural life” 
(p. 185). 

But what has evolution to do with miracles, any- 
way? Why not say with Professor Lane: ‘With 
miracles, therefore, evolution has nothing to do’? 
(“Evolution and Christian Faith,” p. 198.) It is be- 


170 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTIon 


cause evolution as set forth by its leading exponents 
has already passed from the field of biological theory 
and has become a philosophy and a religion. This 
Professor Conklin very frankly shows when he speaks 
of the ‘religion of evolution” and contrasts it with 
supernatural Christianity. Professor Conklin as an 
evolutionist has entered the field of religious polemic. 
He has become in fact an opponent of historic Chris- 
tianity, and he uses the prestige of his scientific repu- 
tation and the resources of his rhetoric to discredit 
the trustworthiness of the Gospels and the historic 
facts upon which, in the judgment of the devout 
Christian, the hope of the world rests. He can scarcely 
complain therefore when the Christian apologist ques- 
tions the philosophy of naturalism which he presup- 
poses and examines the scientific basis of his ambitious 
religion of evolution. If the evolutionist can give 
reasons for doubting the miracles, the theologian cer- 
tainly can give reasons for doubting evolution. If 
Professor Conklin is competent to discuss miracles, 
and to say that “more and more the religious world 
is turning away from the supernatural aspects of the 
miracles to the moral lessons which they convey” (op. 
cit., p. 201), the theologian is competent to discuss 
evolution, and to say that more and more intelligent 
people are turning away from evolution as a preten- 
tious assumption unsupported by facts. 

Evolution as set forth in its authoritative docu- 
ments and Christianity as set forth in its authoritative 
documents, the Gospels, inevitably clash over the ques- 
tion of miracle. It is no longer a conflict in the 


EvoLuTION AND MIRACLE 171 


sphere of the relation between religion and science. 
Both parties are teaching a religion and the two re- 
ligions, the religion of evolution and the religion of 
Christianity, confront each other, and both cannot 
hold the field. One party contends that there is an 
impersonal order of nature which, whether beneficent 
or not, cannot be broken. Miracles do not happen 
and have not happened. The other party sees the es- 
sence of religion in the belief in a God who made 
heaven and earth, who delivered His people histori- 
cally by a mighty hand and a stretched out arm, who 
creates in the sinner a clean heart and a right spirit, 
who is the hearer and answerer of prayer, and watches 
over His children by a special providence, and who 
has based the salvation of the world upon a super- 
natural historical process in the incarnation, atoning 
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Miracle, in 
this view, is not only a proof of revelation but an 
integral part of redemption. Miraculous power and 
redemptive power are inseparable. Only a God who 
can raise the dead can save men from the death of 
trespasses and sins. Christianity without miracle is 
Christianity with religion left out. 

It has often been said, and is said by Professor 
Conklin, that the supernatural has become a “stum- 
bling-block” (p. 198) to religion. As Rousseau said: 
“Otez les miracles de lEvangile, et toute la terre est 
aux pieds de Jésus Christ.” Christianity has always 
been tempted to surrender its distinctive character in 
deference to the spirit of the age from the time when 
the scribes and elders said, “Let him come down from 


172 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutTION 


the cross, and we will believe on him.” From the 
very conception of miracles they are, if they happened, 
at least an exception to the general laws of nature 
(not necessarily a transgression of them). ‘They be- 
long to the field of history rather than to that of 
natural science. It is the evolutionary scientists who 
have forced the question of miracle again to the fore- 
front of discussion. If evolution, as expounded by 
leading authorities, is true, the miracles are mythical; 
while if the Christianity of the Gospels is true, evo- 
lution of the popular type is disproved. We see again 
that the question of the miracles remains one of the 
great watersheds of human thought. 

Take, for example, one miracle related in three of 
our Gospels, the stilling of the tempest. We recall 
the well-known words of a liberal theologian, Har- 
nack: “We are firmly convinced that what happens in 
space and time is subject to the general laws of nature, 
and that in this sense, as an interruption-of the order 
of Nature, there can be no such thing as miracle. .. . 
Miracles, it is true, do not happen; but of the mar- 
velous and the inexplicable there is plenty. ... That a 
storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and 
we shall never again believe” (“What is Christianity,” 
2d ed. rev., pp. 28, 29, 30). If we adopt a pantheizing 
or semi-deistic naturalism, we must reject the truth 
of the narrative of the stilling of the tempest. On 
the other hand if we accept the truth of the narrative 
on historical grounds, the question of an absolutely 
continuous and uniformitarian evolution is settled in 
the negative, If the storm was quieted by the word 


EvoLuTION AND MrrRAcLE 173 


and command of Jesus, then there has been at least at 
this point a break, intrusion, intervention, spiritual 
influx, or interruption of the order of nature, chang- 
ing what would have been otherwise, without a super- 
natural occurrence, the course of events. The question 
is crucial for the evolutionist because if there has been 
such an intervention at one point in the course of 
things there could be similar influxes of creative or 
controlling power, outside of the operation of the gen- 
eral laws of nature, at other points, say at the begin- 
nings of life, of man, or of species, the question at 
each point being decided by the evidence and not by 
an a priori philosophy of continuity. 

If Jesus rebuked the winds and the waves and they 
obeyed Him, He rebuked also all anti-theistic theories 
of the universe, and rebuked as well an evolutionism 
which allies itself with these theories. He rebuked 
materialism, showing that personality, purpose and in- 
telligence, or in short mind is in control of the world 
of matter. Mind can no longer be regarded, as it is 
by the materialist or mechanist, as a sort of dead- 
head tramp stealing a ride on the freight train of 
mechanism. He rebuked the view of the world which 
relegates the activity of God to the remote past alone; 
and rebuked as well the theory which regards God as 
immanent only in the general laws of nature. 

It is often said that the world of description with 
which science deals and the world of interpretation 
or values with which religion deals are incommensu- 
rate, but the two meet in the question of miracle, de- 
fined as an event in the physical world due to the 


174 THE CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTtIon 


immediate power of God, and historically attested in 
the Gospel narratives. The question of miracle comes 
to a head in the resurrection of Christ. According to 
Eucken the acceptance of this event “would mean an 
overthrow of the total order of nature” (‘““The Truth 
of Religion,’ E. T., 1913, p. 528), and according to 
the Apostle Paul its rejection would mean the over- 
throw of the total order of grace (1 Cor. 15: 13-19). 
As recorded in the Gospels, it was an event that oc- 
curred not in the imagination of the disciples but on 
the broad field of history, under definite historical 
conditions, with abundant historical attestation and 
with definite and world-wide historical effects. This 
is not the place to discuss the credibility of the Gospel 
miracles but it must be pointed out that if evolution 
means mechanism with Weismann, or materialism 
with Heckel, or an identity of mind and body with 
Thomson, or naturalism with Conklin, the issue is 
sharply joined in the historical accounts of the mir- 
acles and resurrection of Christ. 

Perhaps Christology is inseparably bound up with 
belief in miracles but theism can get along just as well 
or better without them. Is not the universe, the liv- 
ing garment of God, the one great miracle? And are 
not exceptional miracles, such as those recorded in the 
Gospels, a burden to faith in a scientific age, and a 
burden too grievous to be borne? The question is 
brought to the foreground by an able defender of 
theistic faith, himself an evolutionist, Bishop Gore. 
In a powerful argument, Bishop Gore, in his “Belief 
in God,” reviews the spirit of continental criticism 


EvoL,uTion aND MirRAcLE 175 


which not only discards the miracles “but the whole 
conception of a supernatural incoming of God into 
human life which had sought to extrude Him, and 
into nature where men had sought to forget Him” 
(p. 221). The miracles of the Gospels are vital not 
only to our thought of Christ but to our conception 
of God. “Our thoughts are in the main directed to 
the nature of God as transcendent Creator, under 
whose hands nature is plastic and must fulfill all His 
will” (p. 245). He regards the question of miracle 
as practically that of the freedom of God in His world, 
and so brings it into closest connection with the prob- 
lem of human free-will. He thinks that “the ques- 
tion of the reality of moral freedom... and the ques- 
tion of the credibility of miracles are at bottom one 
and the same question” (p. 234). In miracle God does 
not violate the deeper order of nature but “He inno- 
vates it is true, upon the normal physical order, but 
solely in the interest of the deeper order and purpose 
of the world. Miracle is, from this point of view, 
God’s protest against the monstrous disorder of sin. 
It is God the Creator recreating what man has de- 
faced” (p. 239). Bishop Gore seems to be warning 
us that the interests of belief in miracles and of belief 
in a sovereign and holy God are bound up together; 
and that to give up miracles is inevitably not only to 
loosen our hold upon the freedom of God in His 
world and to that extent upon His personality, but 
also to obscure our vision of His holiness. Miracle 
is the reaction of the righteous and loving will of God 
to the perversion of the freedom of man by sin. To 
12 


176 Tre CHRISTIAN AND EvoLutIon 


deny miracles is to deny transcendence in the sense of 
both power and holiness, and theism will gravitate to 
the higher pantheism, and this in turn to the lower 
pantheism, which can see no dominant righteous order 
in the universe. 

One criticism might be made upon Bishop Gore’s 
exposition. The conception of free-will is funda- 
mental in his thinking. Upon it is based his view of 
the independence of man over against nature, and of 
God’s transcendence over the universe. “If I am not 
certain of free choice,” he says, “I am certain of noth- 
ing” (pp. 141, 142). His thought seems to be that 
the certainty of moral freedom is greater than can be 
the certainty that attaches to any theory in science, 
such as mechanism or evolution. But whence comes 
this moral freedom? Prevailingly and in numerous 
passages Bishop Gore speaks the language of creation- 
ism, that God created free beings, that He created 
finite personalities, that the Creator of all “has made 
man a free being, destined for personal immortality” 
(p. 145). In one passage, however, he yields to the 
current evolutionism so far as to say: “We shall not, 
if we are wise, lay stress on the gaps in the scientific 
story of creation, or build on the conviction that living 
matter could not have been evolved out of what had 
no life, or rationality out of the animal mind” (p. 58). 
But how without gaps or special creation could a free 
and immortal being, made in the image of God, have 
been evolved from the animal? “Creative evolution” 
might accomplish the miracle, because owing to the 
ambiguity of the terms it might mean creation one 


Evolution AND Mrracie 177 


minute and evolution the next; but the transition 
would be impossible for the current theory which sees 
in morality a development from animal impulse and 
holds that man differs from the animal in his endow- 
ments only in degree. Descartes speaks of three tre- 
mendous miracles—rem ex nihilo, liberum arbtiirium, 
et hominem Deum. ‘The freedom of man, according 
to Bishop Gore, comes from God, and its extension to 
God “opens the door to the possibility of miraculous 
action” (p. 288). The tension between this view of 
freedom and that which derives it from the animal 
without gaps and by ordinary generation is apparent. 
If miracle and freedom, as Gore would have it, stand 
or fall together, the one cannot be supernatural and 
the other merely “natural” in origin. 

The miracles of the Gospels attested by abundant 
historical evidence continue to witness to a personal 
God and to His transcendence, His power, His holi- 
ness, and His grace. The Gospel miracles stand as a 
bulwark against the irreligion of a mechanical uni- 
verse from which God is excluded and against the 
moral indifference of a pantheistic universe with which 
God is identified; and they are a bulwark as well 
against that popular form of naturalism which now 
goes under the name of the religion of evolution. 





CHAPTER GXil 


CHRIST AND EVOLUTION 


“Science has nothing to do with Christ.”—Darwin. 


“All things are under One. One Spirit, His 
Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows, 
Rules universal Nature.” —COoOwWPER. 


“Morality He identified with obedience to Himself. Men’s ac- 
ceptance by God He made dependent on their acceptance of His 
claims and gifts. He announced the forgiveness of sins abso- 
lutely, yet connected it with His own death. He has given the 
world its highest idea of God, yet He made Himself one with 
God.”—GrorcE ADAM SMITH, 


“Tf the divinity of Christ be admitted, both He and His origin 
are at once removed entirely from the field of operation for evo- 
lution. Evolution is a law of nature; on the hypothesis of His 
relationship to the Godhead as set forth in the New Testament 
Scriptures, the Christ could not, in the usual sense of the term, 
be a part of nature. The Creator must have existed before the 
thing created, and in the Gospel according to John we are ex- 
pressly told: ‘All things were made by him; and without him 
was not anything made that was made.’ Evolution therefore could 
have had no part in the production of a divine Christ. There is 
no precedent in nature, so far as we know, for the incarnation; it 
can only be accepted by the believer as a unique event; it is not 
to the discredit of the doctrine of evolution that it cannot account 
for Him,”—H, H, Langs, 


XII 
CHRIST AND EVOLUTION 


HE apparent conflict between science and re- 

ligion is due to the fact that science postulates 

a reign of law while religion postulates a reign 
of love. Science says that all things work together 
while religion says that all things work together for 
good to them that love God. Science can only deal 
with the general, the routine, the customary, the 
mechanical, while religion deals with the unique, the 
exceptional, the preferential and the personal. Ex- 
perience includes both realms so that the standpoint 
of both science and religion is partial and not com- 
prehensive. The temptation of the scientist is to 
stretch all experience upon the Procrustean bed of the 
general and the mechanical, thus giving us an im- 
poverished and distorted view of existence, while the 
temptation of the religious thinker is to regard as ex- 
ceptional and unique even those phenomena which may 
properly be referred to general law. 

Those aspects of existence with which science and 
religion respectively deal are not conflicting but com- 
plementary. The majestic sweep of general law is 
not an ultimate and self-existent or self-explanatory 
fact. Whence these laws, such as that of gravitation 
pervading all knowable space? They cannot be the 
result of a chance clash of atoms, or a “molecular 

| 181 


182 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


plebiscite.” Unless we accept them as “given,” that 
is, stop thinking about them, they can only be referred 
to the enactment or decree of a personal will. The 
personal aspect of existence is deeper and therefore 
more ultimate than the mechanical. But on the other 
hand the personal or spiritual-moral aspect of the 
universe requires the mechanical as the theater of its 
activity. Personal freedom can live and breathe only 
in a fixed or determined atmosphere. The moral 
drama of human life must have a stage-setting that is 
fixed and can be counted on, and it can only be enacted 
in the environment of a mechanical world. 

If the story that evolution attempts to tell be taken 
at its face value, man, the final term of the age-long 
process, is also the intended term (if the process 
means anything) and as,such is the key to the inter- 
pretation of the whole. We find then in personality, 
whether we start with general law, with the evolu- 
tionary process, or with the convictions of religion, 
the category which is most inclusive and luminous in 
the explanation of the world. The evidence of the 
personal and preferential becomes more and more 
prominent as the process develops. ‘There is first the 
inorganic realm, the home of the mechanical and the 
uniform. Then rising out of the inorganic there is the 
differentiation and infinite variety of the vegetable 
and animal worlds; and as we have seen there is no 
accepted or acceptable explanation of specific variety 
—no answer to the question, Who made thee to differ? 
—unless this be found in theistic terms of Purpose 
and Power. At last in the appearance of man the 


Curist AND EvoLUTION 183 


greatest gap is opened up, and the universe is dichot- 
omized into the human and the sub-human. No com- 
parison of man with animal, no juggling with the 
terms of ape-man and man-ape based on the slenderest 
objective evidence, has been able to bridge this gulf. 
Here by way of eminence we see capacities and en- 
dowments which, however transmitted, find their 
analogue and their ultimate cause in a Creative Will 
and in the attributes of God in whose image man was 
made. ‘The poets who with anointed vision have seen 
most deeply into nature and human life steadfastly 
refuse to accept the naturalistic account of the origin 
of man, even of the individual man. He comes into 
the world trailing clouds of glory from God who is 
his home; he comes from out the boundless deep; he 
comes from the spiritual world within or beyond the 
world we see, and is the main miracle of existence 
with power on himself and on the world. Even the 
biologist who has done most of late to interpret evo- 
lution in terms of a naturalistic philosophy has con- 
fessed that “the development of a human being, of a 
personality, from a germ cell seems to me the climax 
of all wonders, greater even than that involved in the 
evolution of a species or the making of a world” (E. 
G. Conklin, “Heredity and Responsibility,” Science, 
Jan. 10, 1913). If science is unable to account by 
natural factors for the origin of a single human in- 
dividual it cannot a fortiori account for the origin of 
the whole human race. 

The earliest man of whom we have unmistakable 
evidence in skeletal remains believed in a future life, 


184 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EvoLuTION 


and the rudest savage has some conception of a 
Supreme Being. The religious history of men is the 
search for God, a feeling after God if haply they may 
find Him. Within a certain race, there is evidence 
that a special revelation—an answer to the longings 
of men—was made, ultimately designed to become uni- 
versal. God spoke unmistakably, but in divers por- 
tions and manners, to the fathers in the prophets, and 
at last in the fullness of time in fullness of revelation 
of His grace and truth in His Son, who was in a pre- 
eminent sense the Word. He came with full creden- 
tials, speaking words of grace and of eternal life, and 
performing wonderful works of mercy and power. On 
the field of history He was declared to be the Son of 
God with power by the resurrection from the dead. 
In His best authenticated words He placed Himself 
in the center of the world’s religious life, and increas- 
ing multitudes of men look to Him and His cross with 
reverence and gratitude, and with implicit trust place 
their interests for time and eternity in His hands. 
The evolutionist who exalts his theory into a phi- 
losophy of the universe must perforce deal with the 
outstanding fact of Jesus Christ, and answer the ques- 
tion, “What think ye of Christ?” ‘Two answers are 
possible. The evolutionist may, with Professor Lane, 
accept the doctrine of the church, identifying Jesus 
Christ with the eternal Word and Creator of all 
things, thus regarding Him as the ruler of nature and 
all her laws, including the law of evolution; or the 
evolutionist may regard Jesus as a product of evolu- 
tion and subject like all other facts of natural and 


CHRIST AND E\voLUTION 185 


human history to its laws. In the former case the in- 
carnation must be regarded as not only a unique event 
but as the central fact in the religious history of man- 
kind. To use an expression of Bishop Gore, it domi- 
nates the intellectual situation. A uniformitarian 
philosophy or a philosophy of immanence can no 
longer be held. The acceptance of the incarnation. 
means a view both of God and man profoundly dif- 
ferent from that of evolutionism. It means that God 
can come and has come into human history in a spe- 
cial and supernatural manner; and it means that man 
instead of being of the same kind as the brute is akin 
to God, though differing from Him in an infinite 
degree. ‘To admit that God has spoken through the 
Word is to admit that He can speak and indeed has 
spoken through the prophets. To admit the super- 
natural in the incarnation is to accept the supernatu- 
ral in the ministry, atoning death and resurrection of 
Christ. To admit that in the fullness of time God 
sent forth His Son is to open the way for the ac- 
ceptance on suitable evidence of the special exercise of 
creative power at the critical points of human and of 
natural history. Such a view would not be inconsis- 
tent with the admission of biological evolution or 
transformism within a limited sphere, provided that 
proof was forthcoming that such transformation has 
taken place by some natural knowable method, but evo- 
lutionism as a closed system of naturalism would of 
course be abandoned. 

The other alternative is to make Jesus Christ and 
the religion that He founded the product of evolution. 


186 Tur CHRISTIAN AND EVOLUTION 


C. A. Beckwith, professor of Christian theology, 
shows in his “Idea of God” (1922) what a profound 
transformation the application of evolutionary prin- 
ciples will make in the doctrines of Christianity and 
even of theism. Professor Beckwith teaches that God 
is not conscious in the ordinary sense, for “self-con- 
sciousness is a late comer in the evolution of reality” 
(p. 142). As social conditions change there must be 
a change in the idea of God. ‘No idea of God which 
arises under historical conditions is permanently valid 
for the rational and religious consciousness” (p. 9). 
The idea of God held by Moses, or Paul, or even by 
Jesus cannot be final, for “while each of these ideas 
of God was in turn adequate for the particular period 
in which it appeared, it became progressively insuf- 
ficient for later conditions” (p. 9). Professor Beck- 
with is less certain than Socrates or Plato of a future 
life, for, in speaking of the desire for continued life 
after death, he says that “whether we shall realize this 
in prolonged individual consciousness or only ‘join 
the choir invisible,’ experience here below offers us no 
lighted torch” (p. 334). 

It is interesting to note how Professor J. Y. Simp- 
son, theologian as well as scientist, solves the problem. 
He maintains in his ““Man and the Attainment of Im- 
mortality” that man is not immortal but only becomes 
so when brought into relationship of obedience to 
Jesus Christ. The coming of Christ, it is said, “was 
no more, but also no less a ‘special intervention’ than 
the appearance of life, or self-consciousness, or any 
of the other big lifts in the cosmic process” (pp. 311, 


Curist AND E,VOLUTION 187 


312). The Virgin Birth is a “beautiful story” which 
arose out of belief in the sinlessness of Jesus and a 
misunderstanding of the passage in Isaiah. The doc- 
trines of pre-existence and deity, came, it is intimated, 
from an unwillingness to deny to Jesus the highest 
categories. Continuity must be preserved at all costs: 
“Life builds upon the basis of the inorganic elements; 
self-conscious after all posits consciousness; Jesus is 
the Son of Mary” (p. 264). With one hand Profes- 
sor Simpson lowers, but with the other hand he exalts 
the person of Christ. Jesus becomes non-miraculous 
in origin and person, but so endowed with creative 
power that relationship to Him raises man from the 
level of the beasts that perish to become a sharer of 
the immortal life of God. Jesus becomes of historic 
not of cosmic significance, the product of a temporal 
process, but He is as well the author of eternal sal- 
vation to them that obey Him. The equilibrium in 
Professor Simpson’s scheme is unstable. If, as the 
church has always believed and proclaimed in her 
creeds, Jestis was conceived by the Holy Ghost and 
born of the Virgin Mary, then we have in the com- 
ing of Christ a union of the natural and supernatural 
which may well throw light upon other critical 
moments and “big lifts” in the natural series. 

Over against the certainties of Christian faith and 
experience the evolutional philosophy is a curious mix- 
ture of gnosis and agnosia. The evolutionist “knows” 
that life was produced by natural causes, but he cannot 
describe or reproduce or imagine the conditions under 
which it arose. He “knows” that man is the offspring 


188 Tur CHRISTIAN AND E,voLurIon 


of the animal, but he does not know from what animal 
he sprang, or when, where, how, or in how many in- 
stances the transition took place. He “knows” that 
all species have arisen from natural causes from a few 
forms or from one, but he has never observed a single 
instance of such transformation and has practically 
given up the attempt to imagine how it might have 
taken place. As if to console himself for his loss of 
confidence in natural selection or any proposed method 
of transformation, the evolutionist proclaims that 
though agnostic as to the factors he is certain of the 
fact. The Christian theist is tempted to cry out, as 
Paul did to the intelligentsia of Athens, “What ye 
ignorantly worship that declare I unto you.” ‘The 
growing skepticism of evolutionists as to the factors 
of evolution is being matched by a growing skepticism 
among the intelligent public as to the fact. 

The religious thinker will have an open mind to 
scientific evidence, but will insist that fact and assump- 
tion be carefully distinguished. He will be slow to 
accept as the teaching of science metaphysical infer- 
ences built upon uncertain data. He will attempt to 
prove all things and hold fast that which is good. In 
the present state of scientific opinion he will see every- 
thing to justify the belief that the science of tomorrow 
will be different from the science of today, and he will 
see nothing to forbid the conviction that the word of 
the Lord endureth forever. 5 























nN 


